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 10: The Hidden Years | Chapter 11: X-Men on Hiatus (1970-75) | Chapter 12: The Champions Part 1 (1975-76)

 

Bobby Drake’s story shifts in the back half of The Champions from being mainly about his tension around coming out of the closet (as a mutant superhero) and into a long-running subplot about his supposed romantic interest in new teammate Darkstar. Later writers — particularly those writing in the age when these stories were long out of print — tend to imply that this was an actual relationship, but as we’ll see, she’s just the latest in Bobby’s string of women that he theatrically chases who have no interest in him.

Champions #11 (February 1977)
Writer: Bill Mantlo
Pencils: John Byrne

The Champions team up with Hawkeye and the Two-Gun Kid to fight the Soldiers of Warlord Kaa.

Bobby flirts with Darkstar, who seems wholly uninterested. This begins a subplot that runs through the series where once again Bobby is putting all his romantic energy into a woman who will never want him to follow through.

This is John Byrne’s first time drawing Iceman and Angel.

 

Champions #12-13 (March-May 1977)
Writer: Bill Mantlo
Pencils: John Byrne

The Champions tie up a plot from Black Goliath by stopping Stilt-Man from stealing a bomb that belonged to The Stranger. The bomb is armed anyway, and the Stranger sends the Champions to find the only thing that can stop it from destroying the solar system. In the end, Darkstar saves the day by being able to teleport to find the magic widget.

Iceman now has a thing where he flirts with an oblivious Darkstar or outright leaps to her protection shouting things like “That big weirdo just messed with a lady I like!!” It’s honestly pretty cringey writing even if we’re meant to read him as straight.

 

Ghost Rider Vol 2 #23 (April 1977)
Writer: Jim Shooter and Gerry Conway
Artist: Don Heck

The Champions wave goodbye as Ghost Rider goes off on some adventure. I said comprehensive!

Luckily it’s so inconsequential, because it’s not on Marvel Unlimited.

 

 

 

 

Champions #14-15 (July-September 1977)
Writer: Bill Mantlo
Pencils: John Byrne

The Champions fight Swarm, a Nazi scientist who has become a sentient swarm of bees.

Bobby is still acting weirdly overprotective of Darkstar despite the fact that she has shown zero evidence that she’s even aware he’s alive. Again, this subplot allows Bobby to continue demonstrating to all his friends how grossly heterosexual he is without ever having to act on it.

Bobby finally gets a uniform that covers more than the speedo and boots he’s worn since 1963. Good for him, giving himself a makeover.

Almost immediately, the Champions are all attacked by their own headquarters’ defense systems. Iceman and Hercules come to each others’ aid, and Iceman is positively gushing when Herc gives him a compliment. But when the other Champions find them, Ghost Rider can’t help but make a homophobic comment implying they were just fucking each other in the dark.

 

Godzilla #3 (October 1977)
Writer: Doug Moench
Artist: Herb Trimpe

The Champions fight Godzilla in San Francisco but fail to stop him from destroying the Golden Gate Bridge and causing the SHIELD Helicarrier to crash into the Bay. Nothing of particular importance happens to Iceman.

This issue, along with the next two entries were part of three months of guest-starring appearances in an unsuccessful attempt to drum up interest in The Champions to stave off cancellation. Due to licensing issues, it probably won’t ever be reprinted or put on Marvel Unlimited.

 

 

Iron Man Annual #4 (August 1977)
Writer: Bill Mantlo
Artist: George Tuska

Iron Man asks the Champions for help stopping Modok and AIM from building a super-weapon.

Ghost Rider keeps derisively referring to Darkstar as Iceman’s “girlfriend” when she’s not in earshot, in what is clearly becoming a running subplot of the redneck Ghost Rider’s homophobic bullying of the obviously gay Iceman. This plotline also has Ghost Rider making racist comments about the Russian Darkstar (but oddly not Black Widow).

Of course when the heroes split up into three teams, Bobby jumps at the opportunity to visit San Francisco, where, as you’ll recall, he once briefly lived with his boyfriend Hank McCoy in the silver age.

 

Avengers #163 (September 1977)
Writer: Jim Shooter
Artist: George Tuska

Typhon coerces Iron Man to attack Hercules and the Champions by holding Beast hostage, but the Champions regroup and defeat him. Nothing much to report, but Bobby and Beast have a nice-team up moment where they reminisce about being X-Men. It’s the first time they’ve shared dialogue on-panel since Beast left the X-Men.

While we’re dropping on Hank’s new book, I highly recommend taking a look at Avengers #178 (December 1978), a solo fill-in story by Steve Gerber that follows Hank as he tries, successfully, to pick up women at a bar before he gets attacked by an anti-mutant bigot. Afterward, he recalls that “there was one I really felt comfortable with. They accept me because I’m a certified hero.” Note the singular “they” obscuring the subject’s gender.

Beast then gets accosted by an unnamed, half-naked empathic man, who tells him “You yourself have question the wholesomeness of your newfound acceptance by humans. You yourself– I can say no more!” Later, the empathic man warns him “there remains in you so much–so much–which needs killing.” The empath never appears again, and he’s one of a long line of bizarre Steve Gerber characters who exist mainly to spout the author’s own views. As the event leads Beast to become introspective and depressed about “the agony I must’ve caused my parents by being different,” it sure seems like Gerber is making a direct comment about the futility of Hank McCoy trying to hide his queerness. For example, the empath literally “can say no more” about the subject because of the Comics Code restrictions on presenting homosexuality openly in a positive light.

 

Super-Villain Team-Up #14/Champions #16 (October-November 1977)
Writer: Bill Mantlo
Pencilers: Bob Hall

Oh look, it’s Cancelled Comics Cavalcade! Super-Villain Team-Up was cancelled before its story of Dr. Doom conquering the world was ready to wrap up, so the story continued into Champions which was also being cancelled. The Champions barely even do anything in the story.

Anyway, Magneto tries to convince Dr. Doom to conquer the world with him, but Doom laughs him off because he’s already released a gas into the atmosphere that allows him to control every person alive. He allows Magneto to go free, though, because he’s bored and wants a challenge. Magneto tries to recruit the Avengers, but they’re under Doom’s control, and Doom only allows him to recruit a single hero. He chooses Beast, hoping Beast will help him get the X-Men on side, but they’re too busy saving the universe in X-Men #107-108. Instead, they try to get the Champions, but they’re also under Doom’s control.

“But he’s my friend! He –” How was Bobby going to finish that sentence?

It all ends in a fight on the White House lawn where Doom accidentally inhales his own mind control gas, negating its effects on everyone else, and Magneto flees away.

 

Giant-Size Hulk #1 (June 2006)
Writer: Peter David
Penciler: Juan Santacruz

As the Champions prepare to receive the presidential medal of freedom for their role in stopping Dr. Doom, they get into a fight with the Hulk, who is trying to get his cousin Jennifer (the future She-Hulk) to the hospital when she gets appendicitis.

Hercules makes a fun nod to Marvel time when the Champions say they’re excited to meet President Clinton, but he remembers the president’s name being Carter, as it was in the original story.

A flashback to this fight is seen in Incredible Hulk #106 (July 2007).  

 

Champions #17 (January 1978)
Writer: Bill Mantlo
Pencilers: George Tuska

The Brotherhood of Mutants attacks the Champions and the issue runs out of pages before the team breaks up. A caption helpfully tells you to find the end of the story in Avengers, but it actually ends up in an issue of Peter Parker, Spider-Man. Just a true disaster of a final issue.

Anyway, Iceman and Darkstar are at the premiere of Johnny Blaze’s new movie when they get the signal that the Champions building has been attacked. Bobby is acting like it’s a date, but Darkstar is once again oblivious. When Bobby ices up, he and Darkstar are promptly attacked by anti-mutant bigots in the crowd. Angel pulls him out of it and honestly the way he rides Angel back to the base looks impractical, uncomfortable, and highly homoerotic. Also, unnecessary, since Iceman usually travels pretty fast on his own power!

Blob, Unus and Lorelei have come to the Champions claiming they need protection from a pair of Sentinels hunting them. They’re no longer infants (following Defenders #16) because when Erik the Red returned Magneto to adulthood in X-Men #104, he also accidentally fixed them as well (and presumably Mastermind, who must have decided to go off on his own). But it turns out to be a con – they were sent by the Vanisher, who stole and reprogrammed the Sentinels after being captured by Steven Lang behind the scenes around X-Men #100. He’s just looking for revenge on the X-Men and is starting with Angel and Iceman because they have a publicly listed address (So does Beast, with the Avengers, but he was probably banking on the Champions going down more easily). However, Darkstar manages to take command of the Sentinels, capture the Brotherhood and trap Vanisher halfway between teleporting. He’ll next turn up in Bizarre Adventures #27 (which we’ll get to next week).

 

Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #17-18 (April-May 1978)
Writer: Bill Mantlo
Artist: Sal Buscema

Peter Parker is sent to cover the break-up of the Champions (what, was there going to be a formal ceremony?) but he arrives too late. He and Angel team-up to stop Rampage, who’s brainwashed Iceman into attacking them.

Remarkably, the flashback to the actual breakup takes only a page and a half. They couldn’t fit this into the final issue of Champions?

When Darkstar announces she’s moving back to Russia, Iceman says he loves her. She tells him “though I like you—it has never been more than that!” Bobby’s really quite pathetic in the 70s.

For some reason, when Spider-Man tosses Iceman into a car wash, he snaps out of his brainwashing.

And this issue also wraps the minor Champions subplot about things in their headquarters constantly falling apart when lawyers for the construction company that built it admit that the contractors conspired to destroy the Champions through faulty construction. For some reason, the lawyers believe they have leverage over Warren for it.

Finally, a minor plot point confirms that Spider-Man has known Iceman’s identity since Marvel Team-Up #4 – but it’s not clear the X-Men know his identity, since Angel doesn’t appear to recognize him as Peter Parker. Spider-Man takes care to cover Bobby’s face after he knocks him out so that his secret identity isn’t revealed. This seems to confirm that despite all the tension in the early issues of The Champions, Bobby never actually did “come out” officially during this series.

And that wraps up the Champions era, except there’s one more appearance that belongs here thematically.

 

Incredible Hulk Annual #7 (December 1978)
Writer: Roger Stern
Artist: John Byrne

Angel and Iceman team-up with the Hulk when the new Mastermold attacks.

Iceman invites himself and his new girlfriend over to Angel’s Rocky Mountain mansion for a vacation. And if you’re saying to yourself, “GIRLFRIEND?” Why yes, Bobby is in a relationship with a girl named Terri Sue Bottoms. That’s apparently not meant to be a drag name. Terri only makes one more appearance, which we’ll get to next week.

Angel is back together with Candy Southern, who’ll be his girlfriend through the next decade or so. After this story, Angel rejoins the X-Men and becomes a supporting cast member of Dazzler for a while before joining the New Defenders with Iceman.

Even though they’re already at the weekend-away stage of their relationship, Terri seems to just be using him so she can meet Angel. Terri also must be fairly slow – she’s not meant to know that Bobby is Iceman, despite his unexplained friendship with Angel that extends to Angel allowing him to use the Champions’ jet to fly out to his house. Candy also has a stray thought bubble that she suspects Bobby is Iceman – which is pretty reasonable given she knows Angel’s identity, and that he went to school with four people who look just like the X-Men. The Hidden Years established that she had already figured all that out by this point, but that wouldn’t be published for another 20 years.

John Byrne draws a very beefy Angel, but Terri’s comic lust over him is a little undercut by the fact that Byrne makes Iceman just as cut. There’s a bit of a running gag about the boys wondering if Terri “gets off on ice” which is downright scandalous for the era, but the book also makes it very clear that Angel and Candy are fucking.

When Mastermold attacks, Angel decides the smart thing to do is to lure it to Gamma Base where Hulk can tear it apart. Mastermold captures Angel and Iceman and rockets away to its orbiting base, and Hulk latches on because he’s just so angry. Eventually Mastermold explains that it was on Steven Lang’s orbiting base from X-Men #100, and that Lang’s mind merged with it and is now controlling it. This doesn’t impress Angel, who tells him that the army found Lang’s body and he’s still alive in a government hospital in a vegetative state. This angers Mastermold long enough to distract him while Hulk tears apart his body. The three heroes then escape back to earth in time to see the orbiting base explode with Mastermold’s remains on it (But he’ll return in X-Factor #13). Meanwhile, Lang will turn up again in Uncanny X-Men #291 in the lead-up to the Phalanx story.

And what of the X-Men and other mutants? Well, they’ve been pretty busy getting a complete overhaul during this time. Here are the highlights:

• Uncanny X-Men #95-108: Thunderbird dies trying to stop Count Nefaria (#95); Prof X is having nightmares caused by Lilandra, who’s trying to reach him psychically for help defeating her brother Emperor D’Ken (#96); the nightmares unleash Professor X’s evil side who forces the X-Men to fight psychic illusions of the original X-Men (#106); Moira MacTaggart arrives, pretending to be a housekeeper, and begins a relationship with Banshee (but the X-Men probably know she’s a professor as Google exists and she’s calling herself a doctor by Uncanny X-Men: First Class – Giant-Size Special) (#96); Erik the Red attempts to kill Prof X by attacking him with a brainwashed Havok and Polaris (#97), Juggernaut and Black Tom, who have sometimes been hinted at being more than partners (#102-103), re-aged Magneto (#104), and Firelord (#105); Stephen Lang attacks the X-Men with his new X-Sentinels (#98-100, and Marvels Epilogue), leading to the birth of Phoenix (#101); the X-Men save the universe from D’Ken and Phoenix and Storm learn that Corsair is Cyclops’ father (#107-108)
• Uncanny X-Men #109-116: The X-Men are attacked by Weapon Alpha, who’s trying to force Wolverine to come back to Canada (#109); Warhawk bugs the mansion for the Hellfire Club, Jean decides to stay, and Moira, Havok and Polaris move to Muir Island (#110); Mesmero puts the X-Men in a carnival and Beast attempts a rescue (#111); Magneto takes the X-Men prisoner in Antarctica (#112-113), leading to an extended period where Phoenix and Beast are split from the others and escape back to New York, and both groups believe the others are dead; the other X-Men fight Sauron, Garokk, and Zaladane in the Savage Land (#114-116).
• Amazing Spider-Man #161: Nightcrawler, Spider-Man and Punisher fight Jigsaw (between #96-97)
• Uncanny X-Men: First Class Giant-Size Special: The New X-Men fight a mutant spore species (probably between #96-97)
• The Brotherhood (Blob, Toad, Unus and Mastermind) tries to recruit Santa in Marvel Holiday Special 1991 (immediately before #98)
• Marvel Team-Up Annual #1, Marvel Team-Up #53, and Marvel Tales #262: The new X-Men meet Spider-Man and fight the Lords of Light and Darkness, and Sunstroke and his Desert Dwellers (around #101)
• Iron Fist #14-15: Sabertooth debuts, and the X-Men get into a fight with Iron Fist in Jean’s apartment upon their return from outer space in #108. Scott and Jean also cameo in Iron Fist #11.
• Uncanny X-Men: First Class #1-8: The X-Men fight the Inhumans when Nightcrawler insults their customs; Banshee’s ex-father-in-law hires a mutant voodoo priest to torment him; Storm, Jean, Misty Knight and Colleen Wing are forced to team up to fight Nightshade; the X-Men fight the Knights of Hykon, and the Banshee solves the murder of one of Cassidy Keep’s leprechauns. (Entire series fits between #109-110)
• Marvel Treasury Edition #26: Wolverine gets into a bar fight with Hercules. (Between #110-111)
• Captain America Annual #4: Magneto fights Captain America with his new Brotherhood, which includes a debuting Peepers.
• Ms. Marvel #16-23: Mystique, probably the most prominent queer villain in the X-Men universe, makes her debut in a subplot where she wants to take down Ms. Marvel. The book was cancelled before writer Chris Claremont got to finish the story, and the final two issues were eventually published a decade later in Marvel Super-Heroes Vol 2 #10-11. In MSH #10, she fights Sabertooth, who’s escaped from SHIELD custody, where they were training him to go after Wolverine. In MSH #11, Claremont seems to be cramming in a whole bunch of unrelated concepts to resolve all of Ms. Marvel’s plots before her cancellation/death. So Ms. Marvel ends up caught in the middle of an arms deal involving Mystique’s Brotherhood and the Hellfire Club – that’s right, if published, it would have been the first appearances of Rogue, Destiny, Pyro, Avalanche, Shaw, Leland, Pierce, and Tessa/Sage. It’s also fairly clear that Mystique and Destiny have a domestic relationship, so this would have been the earliest lesbian relationship in the X-Men universe. We learn that Mystique is trying to destroy Ms. Marvel because Destiny has predicted she’ll destroy Rogue. In the event, Ms. Marvel was cancelled and she was written out in the notorious Avengers #200, and Claremont came back to fix the plot back to what was intended in Avengers Annual #10, where Rogue debuts and steals her powers. Another oddity of that final Ms. Marvel story is that she keeps having hallucinations similar to Mastermind’s timeslip manipulation of Phoenix – she even appears in the same Black Queen costume. Was Claremont intending Ms. Marvel to be the original Dark Phoenix? Frequent X-Men villain Deathbird also debuts in Ms. Marvel #9-10 and #22.
• Marvel Team-Up #65-66: Captain Britain makes his US comics debut, teaming up with Spider-Man to fight the debuting occasional X-Men villain Arcade.
• Marvel Team-Up #69-70: Havok is captured by Living Pharaoh and teams-up with Spider-Man and Thor to stop him (Havok’s abduction is what prompts Lorna to ask Beast to look for the X-Men in #111).
• Defenders #62-65: While in New York, Havok and Polaris join the Defenders for a day along with dozens of other heroes. Among the dozens of villains they fight are Blob and Toad.
• Classic X-Men #1-22 features many back-up strips set in this era, most of which are inconsequential expansions of the concurrent stories or character pieces. The highlights are: The X-Men return Thunderbird’s body to his family and they meet his younger brother, who will go on to become Warpath (#3); Wolverine dares Nightcrawler to spend a day in town without his image inducer, and the owner of Harry’s Hideaway comments on how handsome he is (#4); Sebastian Shaw takes over the Hellfire Club after its anti-mutant leadership tries to have him killed (#7); Sabertooth attempts to kill Wolverine on his birthday (#10); We learn Magneto’s origin living through the Holocaust, the arson that kills his daughter, and his brief career as a Nazi hunter (#12, 19); We see the formation of the Starjammers (#15); Colossus makes love to two Savage Land women (#21), with whom we later learn he fathered a son (Uncanny X-Men Annual #12); Storm ventures into an alien dimension where it is heavily implied that Storm has a sexual relationship with its warrior queen M’Rin (#22)

Next Week: We’ll take a look at what Bobby was up to from 1979-1983, when he wasn’t regularly appearing anywhere.

Where to find these issues: Unless otherwise noted, they’re all available on Marvel Unlimited. The Champions Classic Complete Collection TPB includes the entire run of The Champions, plus the Iron Man Annual, Hulk Annual, and Spectacular Spider-Man, Avengers, and Super-Villain Team-Up issues. The Uncanny X-Men issues are all in Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol 1. The Mystique appearances are all in the Ms. Marvel Epic Collection Vol. 2. The Classic X-Men stories are all collected in X-Men Classic Omnibus.