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.

More on Valentine's Day

I went downstairs this morning and there was no newspaper on the front stoop. So I'll continue with my ruminations on Valentine's Day.

My wife, at the beginning of our relationship, used to coach me days before February 14 to make sure that I had gifts ready to go. I couldn't understand why it was so important; it seemed unreal and insincere to me -- the candy, the flowers, the cloying cards, the candlelight dinners. It made more sense as a kid trapped in a elementary school classroom with 30 other kids; then, being forced to communicate your feelings and show a little affection and overdosing on heart candy one day out the year, it was like Mardi Gras. But the adult man-woman Valentine's ritual does not liberate; it binds, in disappointment, failure, regret.

As I walked home yesterday from work I felt good. I am a free man. Back at the job, most of the women seem unhappy. They are either alone or with someone, a husband or a lover, who is not making them happy (enough) -- as if it is their right that they be made happy by a man; as if they are little girls entitled to daddy's love and care. I felt for the people I passed by on 12th Avenue out on the town for Valentine's dates, planted on bar stools or staggering down the sidewalk drunk. All that projection, all that suffering. On the iPod Anthony Hamilton's "Charlene" synchronistically appeared:

I felt good too walking to work that morning on 12th Avenue. What brought a smile to my lips was hearing the old hippie standard "Carry On" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young:

The hippies get blamed for a lot, and rightly so -- their infantile narcissism and their poltroonish naivete -- but on the big issues -- the evils of the rat race and the primordial nature of peace and love -- they were right. The hippies' mistake was in the belief that the race to be run was a sprint. It's not. It's an ultramarathon. Change takes time and the wiliness of Odysseus.

After "Carry On" -- I'm listening to songs alphabetically now -- came Malouma's "Casablanca." I felt ecstatic: