The Defenders #10

Recently I read all the issues of The Defenders, Vol. 4, which kicked off at the end of 2011 and then was cancelled at the beginning of 2013 with issue #12. Matt Fraction authored the comic book throughout its run, and I'm sorry to say that for the most part -- and by this I mean something like three out of every four issues -- were tired, distracted, emotionless loops around the superhero comic carousel. Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of Matt Fraction. I loyally read his Hawkeye, Vol. 4, a brilliant, refreshing, cutting-edge book. And I said before on this page that his Invincible Iron Man will go down in the history books as synonymous with the period of hope and change (it turned out to be delusional) that Obama's 2008 campaign and first years in the White House ushered in. But what I have also noticed is that Fraction is willing to pimp himself out to the point of overextension. His work then tends to the overly sarcastic and thin. I'm thinking here of his run on The Mighty Thor.

The Defenders when it first appeared in the early 1970s was unique in spotlighting a team of outcasts. This was Marvel's answer to the recently spawned "One Nation Underground." The social upheaval of the late 1960s might have been checkmated politically by Nixonland, the "Silent Majority," but at the end of the day in the United States you still had an enormous counter culture, a massified bohemia that had its own newspapers, grocery stores, film and music -- and those tastes were coming to dominate the mainstream majority.

Roy Thomas, like so much that he did for Marvel in the early '70s, was just being a shrewd businessman when he stuck a Greenwich Village beatnik (Doctor Strange), with a Gamma-powered Frankstein monster (Hulk), a cosmically-juiced master of the spaceways (Silver Surfer) and last but not least, Marvel's founding anti-hero, the underwater Tecumseh, Namor the Sub-Mariner. This was a group that could speak to the Hippies.

Below you'll find five scans from Fraction's The Defenders #10. The cover, by Joe Quinones, is a wonderful homage to the early Bronze Age. The four stunning interior pages are by Jamie McKelvie with Mike Norton; Jordie Bellaire provides the color. The final page pictures Red She-Hulk wiping out a crow.