Saving Churchill

 

cover art by Jack Kirby

Invaders #4 (January 1976) picks up right where the previous issue left off. In fact, a few pages in, after Captain America and the two Torches commandeer a plane, we get a handy map that recaps the situation.

I love maps.

Last issue, we learned that a traitorous Atlantian, called U-Man, had been given super powers by the Nazis and was planning on ambushing Winston Churchill. Namor and Bucky were heading to the ambush location in Namor's plane. The other three Invaders, without time to wait for red tape, steal a dive bomber and head out in the same direction.

In the meantime, the U-Man arrives along with a few minions near the battleship H.M.S. Duke, which is awaiting Churchill's arrival. He captures a patrol boat, aboard which is Betty Dean, Namor's one friend among the surface people. 

U-Man turns out to be something less than a tactical genius. He recognizes her value as a hostage, but makes her a prisoner in the cabin of the boat right next to a working radio. She alerts the Allies to what is going on just as Churchill's plane is landing. That plane immediately begins to take off again.

U-Man manages to board the plane before it can gain altitude. Namor arrives and the two Atlantians begin to duke it out atop that plane. Remember that there's also a battleship nearby. There's some Atlantian minions handy and there's no reason to think the Nazis don't have one or more U-boats nearby. The rest of the Invaders are just arriving. We are all set for an epic fight scene in an unusual setting with enough super-humans, humans and weaponry to make it interesting. Roy Thomas and Frank Robbins can really go to town here.

But this doesn't happen. I am a big fan of Roy Thomas' writing, but someone makes a terrible editorial decision here to use this issue to plug another comic book. Skull the Slayer, about a group of people thrown into the distant past by a time warp in the Bermuda Triangle, had debuted a few months earlier. 

And the U-Man vs. Invaders fight is also set in the Bermuda Triangle, where it is interrupted by a time warp. The Torches save Churchill's plane from being sucked into the past and the good guys and bad guys end up seperated. Just like that, the fight is over. What was potentially one of the greatest comic book fights ever is nipped in the bud by the decision to cross-market a completely unrelated title. 

I don't know whose idea this was. Roy Thomas edited The Invaders as well as wrote it. Len Wein had edited the first issue of Skull the Slayer, but by this time Marv Wolfman had taken over. And (if I've got my editor-in-chief timeline correct), Wolfman had recently taken over from Wein as editor-in-chief at Marvel, who had in turn taken over that job from Thomas a year or two earlier. 

But whomever it was decided to stop a fight that could have easily been continued into the next issue and would have unquestionably been wonderful--well, I'm still mad at that guy 45 years later. I'm not knocking Skull the Slayer--that book had a disjointed story arc because it kept switching writers, but it was still fun. But a random shout-out to it in a World War II-themed book made no sense at all and gave the Invaders story a weak ending. 

Next week, we'll jump back to the Old West to look at another story from Dell's Indian Chief.