Iceman's Wacky Existential 80's Adventure

One thing I share in common with my Marvel cohort Tim Dillon is that Iceman is far and away my favorite member of the X-Men.

As with so many of my favorite characters, I'm note entirely sure when or why I started digging Iceman, but I think it can be traced back to somewhere around 1991 when Chris Claremont and Jim Lee unleashed X-Men #1 on the world and likely had a lot to do with aesthetics. Particularly the way Lee drew him back then, I just thought the character looked cool (pun unintended), with his sleek, simple "costume" and it was something most artists could nail pretty easily. He also had neat powers that were different from the ill-defined energy blasts, generic super strength and claws of every kind that populated the 90's.

Just like with Wally West and Rich Rider, as I got to know the Bobby Drake side of Iceman, I found in a nice coincidence that he had a persona I really dug as well. He's the perennial cocky wiseass of the X-Men, but he's also extremely powerful albeit mostly via untapped potential and is crazy insecure about that and a litany of other things; a perfect cocktail for a fun, multi-layered character in my book.

Unfortunately, it seems more often than not that creators don't have much use for Iceman. Don't get me wrong, most of the time writers have good intentions for the guy, but the fact is there are five million X-Men and Iceman just doesn't often make the cut for the A-team. Folks like Scott Lobdell, Fabian Nicieza, Mike Carey and others have made great strides at tapping some of that aforementioned potential, but poor Bobby just seems to get perennially lost in the shuffle.

However, Iceman has had his share of solo stories over the years, and some really stand out; one such tale is the Iceman limited series from 1984 by J.M. DeMatteis and Alan Kupperberg. I nabbed it in full during college right after I discovered eBay, off which I also got an Iceman action figure from the 90's that I used to freeze in my mini-fridge and a bootleg t-shirt with him and the Human Torch on it.

Anyways, the comic is trippy as shit.

At the time, Iceman was a member of the DeMatteis-written New Defenders, an eclectic group made up of former X-Men like Bobby, Beast and Angel as well as oddballs such as Cloud, Gargoyle and Andromeda. It was a weird time for an Iceman mini, but it happened, and the results were cee-razy.

It starts with Bobby Drake paying a visit to his parents and catching up with some extended family. Bobby's dad as well as most of his relatives consider him a disappoinment because he ditched a job as an accountant, which everybody else in his family does, and they ride him for it during most of issue one.

(On a side note, I've always found it fantastic that Iceman is a certified public accountant)

Bobby gets pissed off, flirts with some mysterious girl who has moved in next store, then this weird characters named White Light and The Idiot show up. From there it gets weird.

Turns out the neighbor girl is some sort of cosmic entity whom White Light and Idiot are trying to recapture for their mysterious boss. Over the course of the next couple issues, she drags them and Iceman back in time where he meets his parents as teenagers for a little "they used to have dreams like me" bit until his dad gets freakin' shot and he gets whisked away again.

The third issue is a surreal journey of self-discovery as Bobby Drake seemingly gets aged through childhood, the founding of the X-Men, his tenure with the Champions and into his Defenders gig, complete with more of his parents calling him a failure, jokes about Jean Grey being dead, Darkstar dissing him because he's a capitalist pig, and other assorted wackiness. It is absolutely bizarre and DeMatteis makes it cool and cerebral like only he can.

Ultimately, we find out that neighbor girl is Mirage, the daughter of the abstract entity Oblivion, who makes his first appearance here before going on to be a Quasar villain and floating head at those power meetings Eternity calls to order whenever Thanos gets the Infinity Gauntlet. Most recently he showed up in Guardians of the Galaxy.

So yeah, the Marvel Universe's embodiment of nothingness and ennui first showed up in an Iceman limited series--how rad is that?

Anyways, our hero gets caught in a tug of war between father and daughter over whether or not life is worth living, taking charge of your existence and destiny, following your dreams, and a lot of other heady concepts you'd think the X-Men's class clown would be the last character you'd use as a window to, but again, credit Marc DeMatteis for being able to pull it off.

In the end, more weirdness happens, but Iceman does end up gaining a victory of sorts over a guy who gives the Silver Surfer fits and then heads home to reconcile with his parents, tell them he loves them, reiterate his lack of desire to be an accountant, then get called away by Beast and Angel for a new mission.

Summarizing that was a load of fun and I know I got a ton of details wrong because I haven't actually read the book in ages, though I now need to rectify that ASAP. The moral is that while most Iceman stories involve him creating slides and throwing snowballs in the background of a big X-Men battle, he had a four issue epic where he traveled through time, fought a guy named The Idiot more than once, almost scored with a cosmic entity, then overcame the universe's most powerful force for entropy.

Thank you, Mr. DeMatteis. And Marvel Collected Editions, let's get working on this, please.

Remember the Secret Defenders?

Over my five years as a proud comic book semi-professional, more often than not when I hear the term "Secret Defenders" it has been as the punchline of a joke, both in fan circles as well as among my peers. At this point I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many of those making the joke don't even know who or what they're talking about.

Secret Defenders launched back in 1993 with the high concept of a team with no set roster, but instead Doctor Strange using his magic to determine which groupings of Marvel heroes were best equipped to deal with certain missions and then bringing them together to do just that. As explained by writer Roy Thomas on a text page in the back of the very first issue, it was more or less a natural outgrowth of the original Defenders--Strange, Hulk, Namor and the Silver Surfer--who were called a "non-team" in that they weren't particularly chummy and only hung out when there was work to be done.

Let's give credit where credit is do right off the bat: the conceit behind the Secret Defenders was a pretty bad ass idea. I mean, the New Avengers are the most successful super hero group of the past decade on at least a commercial level based on Brian Bendis bringing together a disparate group of popular characters and making them a team then watching the interpersonal dynamics fly (ok, obviously he does more than just watch, but you get my gist). Going even further back (way further back), the Justice League and even Justice Society were solo heroes who didn't necessarily have any need to band together other than it was a cool idea that publisher knew would sell comics, so let's go for it.

Part of the fun of team books and what has made the Avengers and Justice League in particular work so well over the years is the idea of throwing characters who work well on their own into a blender and then seeing how they mix (I'm excepting "family" concepts like the Fantastic Four, X-Men and even Teen Titans as they have a different vibe to them). With Secret Defenders, you got that mix and match, but not just every couple years when writers felt like shaking things up and not with members coming and going one by one or two by two, no, you got a whole new team just about every other month!

Honestly, it's as basic a "kids will love this" concept as giving a bad guy a black and white version of Spider-Man's suit plus some fangs and then counting the money you make; it should have worked. And hey, I wasn't on the inside 16 years ago, so maybe Secret Defenders did work on some level, but it only lasted 25 issues, so even accounting for the shark-infested comics landscape of the mid-90's it couldn't have done that well, and in spite of what I'm sure were solid efforts by guys like Roy Thomas (no slouch by any stretch of any imagination) I don't think the book ever achieved it's creative potential.

I think you can look at the initial Secret Defenders line-up that was featured over the first three issues and kinda see the big problem: it consisted of Strange, Wolverine, Darkhawk, Nomad and the second Spider-Woman (Julia Carpenter). Obviously Wolverine was (and is) an absurdly popular character while Darkhawk and Nomad were both guys struggling to keep solo books afloat and Spider-Woman was an ancillary member of the West Coast Avengers. I remember reading the first issue and not finding anything particularly compelling about how these four heroes interacted; it was a nice lady, an insecure kid and two gruff loners, but there was no real conflict or neat bonding moment that showed me the worth of this cool concept really being mined.

Looking back on it, while I admit I could be totally wrong, it seems to me from an "insider" perspective that three random characters were just stuck with Wolverine because somebody higher up figured maybe that could give their respective books some heat. If you look at the second arc, it's the same basic deal with the Punisher in the Wolverine role with solo "star" Sleepwalker and New Warriors member Namorita tagging along. In the third arc, Strange hooks up Spider-Man with Captain America and the Scarlet Witch to face a villain they've all fought before, so there's a bit more logic there, but then after that we get the Surfer, War Machine and Thunderstrike (I guess Surfer was supposed to be the "draw" in that group, but I'm not entirely sure).

Incidentally, issue #11 is the only one I own besides #1 and I do kinda love it because it's got Nova teaming with the Hulk (in my favorite of his incarnations as "the Professor") and Northstar to smash a robot during the Starblast crossover (it also featured the classic line "Not once has anybody ever yelled 'Look! Up in the sky! It's the Man Called Nova!'"). Granted I'm biased given who was more or less the star of said story, but I dug issue #11 as it had some cool interplay between dueling cocky hotshots in Nova and Northstar, then the friggin' Hulk coming in to save the day and make them both look stupid; it was a fun little bit of business and more along the lines of what I wanted to see from the book.

Issue #11 was actually the last one featuring Doctor Strange though, as events in his own book took him out of play for a bit and he was replaced in the short term by Thanos for a villains-centric arc and then in the long-term by Doctor Druid.

If Secret Defenders was lighting the sales chart on fire before, I'm sure the addition of career D-lister Doc Druid didn't help the situation. To make matters worse, around issue #15 or so, the rotating cast thing was more or less abandoned and fringe characters Cadaver and Shadowoman were made the core team along with Druid while guest stars like Deadpool, Luke Cage and other were relegated to extended cameos. So whereas before Secret Defenders at least had some sort of unique hook, now it was just another team book, albeit with characters most people didn't care about.

Interestingly enough, the very same year Secret Defenders debuted, DC launched Justice League Task Force with the same "different team for every mission" gimmick and Martian Manhunter in the Doctor Strange role. JLTF always seemed to have a little more heat to me as the line-ups were generally more high profile (the leadoff team was J'onn, the Flash, Aquaman, Nightwing and Gypsy), but like it's Marvel counterpart, it too abandoned its gimmick and became a "Justice League-in-training" book with the inspired writing of Christopher Priest trying to work magic with the fairly uninspired grouping of J'onn, Gypsy, the Ray, Triumph and L-Ron (the book made it to issue #37).

So why didn't Secret Defenders or Justice League Task Force work? Obviously it's an impossible question for me to answer with 100% certainty as I wasn't there, but I have my ideas. My buddy Sean had an interesting post over at Robot 6 where he shared recent comments made by my Marvel superiors (in all ways) Tom Brevoort and Joe Quesada about the nature of "sharing" characters across office lines for stuff like crossovers; this kind of negotiation generally goes pretty smoothly in this day and age from what I've observed, but based on what I've read, the Marvel of 1993-1995 wasn't nearly as cross-polination-happy, as that was the period during which multiple "editors-in-chief" were assigned different groups of books and operated in a vacuum to some degree. I can only imagine that for whoever was in charge of Secret Defenders, the cherry picking of who would fill the book each month that likely would have been fun in other eras had to be something of a chore, hence why we ended up with the somewhat cookie cutter teams of the early arcs and then eventually characters who would belong solely to the title were brought in.

It's a shame that Secret Defenders (and by the same token Justice League Task Force) were launched in time period they were only to crash and burn under the pressures of the industry as it was then, because it really is a cool idea. In 2009, with creators and editors who have encyclopedic knowledge of the most obscure characters and the ability to make them shine as well as a fanbase that thrills to odd pairings like Deadpool and Shang-Chi, Secret Defenders could be a money book both from a dollars and cents perspective as well as from the plain good read side of things.

Maybe there's a writer or editor out there right now who can see past the punchline to the potential and we'll get a retread done right sooner than later, but until then I'll always have my Secret Defenders #11.