For those who recently watched the first season of X-Men ‘97, a scene in Defenders Epic Collection: Enter: The Headmen that might seem a little familiar.
In the Disney+ cartoon – specifically in episode 2, “Mutant Liberation Begins” – there is a moment where Magneto lifts a chunk of the United Nations high above the city in a show of massive power. The episode is most clearly an homage to Uncanny X-Men #200, from 1985, titled The Trial of Magneto. In that issue, our boy is dressed up in his magnificent purple onesie as he goes on trial at the Hague. It’s a classic issue with a classic John Romita, Jr cover.
So how does a Defenders book collecting issues released a full decade before that story tie-in?
The Defenders #15-16, by writer Len Wein and artist Sal Buscema, features what might be the most bonkers Magneto story of all time, not least because it would be the final Magneto story written before the monumental and formative X-Men run of writer Chris Claremont that would define the Master of Magnetism into a soulful, tragic, and believable Holocaust survivor.
The Magneto of 1974 was a much more ridiculous character, one bent on cartoonish world domination and still called his team the Brotherhood of EVIL Mutants. It is this ghoulish, cartoonish version of the character that tears the United Nations building from the earth’s crust and lifts it high over New York.
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Or, rather, he has his freshly created, genetically altered super mutant pet, Alpha, lift it.
The X-Men wasn’t exactly a going concern in 1974 – the book had been in reprints for half a decade, which is why our Defenders – Doctor Strange, the Incredible Hulk, Valkyrie, and new recruit Nighthawk – are the ones gathered by Professor X to battle Mags, despite having little real connection to the character. Perhaps this lack of experience might explain why they are incapable of doing a single thing about Magneto’s plans. In the end, it’s Alpha who stops the Evil Mutants: he turns them all into babies.
Even as a Baby the Blob is a big boi.
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And that’s where we leave Magneto – a weeping infant – for two years. The X-Men’s greatest foe and one of Marvel Comics’ most recognizable supervillains is left $#!+ing in his diapers until Claremont brings him back in Uncanny X-Men #104, where he ignores this story altogether.
There are better stories in Enter: The Headmen, certainly. Though Len Wein’s time with the book suffered from a lot of ho-hum action and by-the-numbers conflict, the book kicks off (and gets weird) when Steve Gerber comes on in issue #20. Gerber – perhaps one of Marvel’s most off-the-wall writers at the time – is the one who would push Defenders into fantastic new territory and establish the team as the company’s strangest.
He also began layering in pathos, deepening the characters and their conflicts. The Defenders (along with Luke Cage, Daredevil, and Daimon Hellstrom) confront a racist secret society, for example, and Valkyrie struggles with her identity (she resided in the body of a now-dead woman whose life – and marriage – continued to haunt her).
They’re called the Headmen because they’re men with head-based self-esteem issues.
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In an early bit of back-issue salvaging, Gerber reintroduces a handful of oddballs – the titular Headmen – from Marvel’s Atlas Comics days of the 1950s, when American comics were rooted firmly in horror and science fiction books. The origin stories appear in this volume, having been reprinted in Weird Wonder Tales #7.
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The Headmen don’t see much action in this volume, but they show promise – as does the Elf With a Gun, whose absurd (and pointedly inconsequential) saga begins in #25. The Elf typifies Gerber’s penchant for lunacy nearly as much as Howard the Duck.
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All that is to say that Defenders Epic Collection: Enter: The Headmen is more than passing strange, but only hints at how odd the series would become. Though the book struggles to find its way, it is never without absurd charm, and it’s a joy to encounter such bizarre and ignored moments in Marvel history.
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