I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes it’s hard coming up with ideas for articles.
Let’s face it, there are only so many new toys out there to review, and sometimes we humble Fwooshers have to dig deep to come up with interesting content. I thought I’d struck some in the form of an untapped vein of obscure villains that appeared during the first thirty or so issues of Marvel Team-Up. Surely there were enough worthy contenders for a Spotlight article or Top Ten list. Then I took a good look at the run and realized what I thought was a bronze-age goldmine was instead a treasure-trove of Morts. With a pile of Christmas presents yet to wrap and my time running out, I dove in head-first, determined to make the best of it. Grab a big glass of egg nog or a little pinch of mistletoe and join me in a look at Seven Villains Marvel Would Rather You Forget!
7. Infinitus
Is he the reincarnation of an Egyptian king returned to the modern day to destroy his age-old foes? Or is he just some putz in green tights who probably should have known better? If you said the latter, pick a prize from the top row, pal. Looking like a cut-rate Parademon, Infinitus here was lacking in pretty much everything, but at least had the dignity to be defeated in a single issue. He’s filler and he knows it, going down without much of a fuss. If only the rest of these chuckle-heads could say the same.
6. The Monstroid
I know, it sounds stupid, but this guy’s real name is Ballox, so Monstroid is a definite improvement. An alien robot left over from the Kree-Skrull wars falls under the sway of the Puppet-Master, who uses it to attack the Baxter Building. In typical Mort fashion, he discovers the Fantastic Four aren’t home, so it falls to Spider-Man and the Vision to whip his wimp ass. The conflict is dragged out for 22 pages because otherwise the comic would be nothing but ads for Hostess Cupcakes and Count Dante, the Deadliest Man Alive. Fighting an obese robot may seem beneath an A-lister like Spidey, but the 1970s were hard on everybody. Never mind the Ballox, here’s the Monstroid!
5. Man-Killer
When a man causes the accident that paralyzes Olympic skier Katrina Luisa Van Horn, she is given a powerful exo-skeleton and a burning hatred of anyone with a Y chromosome. With “seven times the strength of a man,” she leads a group of militant feminists in an attack on a Harlem power plant. Turns out there’s a special project going on in the basement, “quite hush-hush, you understand,” and the newly christened Man-Killer steals a prototype nuclear generator. After a bit of a tussle, Spidey forgets what Aunt May told him about hitting women and lays out the Man-Killer with a right to the jaw. So “yay!” women’s equality? With lines like “He’s a man, baby — and men are DIRT!” and “Crawl, manling! Crawl like the insect you are!”, the story is very much a product of its times. They just so happened to be times when people weren’t mortally wounded by being offended and just about any topic was fodder for the monthly comics mill.
4. Basilisk
If you watch Agents of SHIELD, then you know that the Kree treat Earth like their own personal junkyard. You can’t swing a cat here without knocking over a Diviner or Nega-Bomb. Case in point: the Alpha Stone. This leftover hunk of cosmic junk turns meek gem thief Basil Elks into — the Basilisk! Yes, folks, he chose that name himself. That’s like a certain web-headed hero receiving his powers and declaring himself “Peter-Man.” At any rate, Basil is on the hunt for the Omega Stone, which will make him all-powerful or something. No surprise, he doesn’t get it, and slinks off to lick his wounds. The Basilisk kicked around the Marvel Universe until Scourge put him out of his misery, but he’s recently been resurrected by the Hood, which means some lucky bastard gets to kill him again.
3. Unholy Three
Former Ani-Men members Ape-Man, Cat-Man, and Bird-Man decide to strike out on their own. To assert their newfound independence, they immediately become the flunkies of the Exterminator. Yeah, I had look him up too. The Unholy Three pretty much volunteer for a beatdown of a lifetime. I mean, they’re three regular dudes in animal costumes — they have to know they don’t stand a chance against Spider-Man and Daredevil. The world’s best-known super villains can’t defeat them, so what chance would these Banana Splits rejects possibly have? Listen, I admire their moxie: sometimes God loves a trier. But next time aim lower. I hear the Sons of the Tiger are getting back together . . .
2. City Stealers
In the 1970s, there was a lot of crime in New York. In fact, it got so bad someone jacked Manhattan. No, not just a couple of people, the entire borough. Yep. Just dragged it away with a chain. In the book, two unnamed robots show up in their pimped-out earth-mover and start cutting away the bedrock that holds Manhattan in place. Oddly enough, only Spider-Man and Hercules show up to stop them, even though the Avengers, Fantastic Four, and X-Men all live in New York. What could be more important that stopping the theft of an entire borough? Fighting Ultron for the tenth time just seems like an excuse when the Empire City is sailing downstream. Still, everything turns out okay in the end, because Herc helpfully puts it back:
No wonder they call him the helpful Avenger. Wait, they don’t? Well, they should! He just moved an island, people!
1. Stegron
A graduate of the Basil Elks School of Villainous Nom de Plumes, Dr. Vincent Stegron was turned into a human/dinosaur hybrid, but he stuck with his old name anyway. Maybe he just thought it sounded good, or perhaps he didn’t want to have to get new business cards printed up; most likely, he simply couldn’t think of anything better with that pea-sized brain of his. Whatever the case, Stegs has the brilliant plan to using all of the dinosaurs in the Savage Land in his war against humanity. He is stopped by Spider-Man and Ka-Zar, but the heroes needn’t have bothered. Y’see, the Savage Land is an an artificially created tropical forest region on an island in Antarctica. As soon as Stegron’s open-topped boatload of dinosaurs left the warmth of the Savage Land, they would have dropped dead from the cold. Like I said — tiny brain. Stegron is currently extinct.
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