The one about the Blazing Skull.
Every so often, when Marvel makes a movie or licensing deal, a news article will point out that Marvel's library of characters is said to be upwards of 5000, which is pretty impressive, until you start to think about the actual list. A lot of that could be taken up by supporting characters alone. That sounds foolish, but you try and publish a comic with Debra Whitmore as a character and see what happens. (She was a love interest in
Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, and also appeared in the cartoon. Any day now she'll appear in
Ultimate Spider-Man so Bendis can do something horrible to her, no doubt.)
Still, Marvel does have some neat characters that are well underneath the radar. Some of them are ideas that might not deserve or be able to sustain their own comic, but might work well in another format, like Blade. Who would have thought that could carry three movies and a TV show? Don't get me wrong, I liked the movies just fine, but in his first appearance he was wearing what looked like green scuba goggles. Nightvision goggles my arse.
Others are characters who should appear in one-shots or the occasional period piece. Which finally brings us to today's book!
Midnight Sons Unlimited #9. This book was intended to be a showpiece/inventory burner for the "mystical" characters at Marvel: Ghost Rider, Blaze, Morbius, maybe Dr. Strange. The only reason most people would remember this particular issue, if at all, was because it had an Alex Ross cover.
The cover features lesser known characters the Destroyer, the Blazing Skull, and Union Jack. I'm scratching my head trying to figure out how and why Alex Ross did the cover. Inventory piece from before he got big? For fun? As a favor to the creative team? Boat payment due? Love letter to the work of Roy Thomas? Did he do the cover first, and the writer had to punch out a story based on it? That last one seems particularly unlikely, but maybe. Dan Slott wrote the main story, and James Fry did the pencils. Fry I was familiar with from his work on DC's Star Trek books. I like his style, kind of cartoony, but still good for likenesses. And Slott would go on to bigger things, as he's currently the writer of
She-Hulk,
the Thing, and
GLX. I must underline that this was a quality package for a book that was primarily a dumping ground for unused Man-Thing short stories.
I'm a little ashamed to admit this, as a total Marvel nerd, but I'm really not that familar with the Blazing Skull or the Destroyer. A version of the Skull appeared in Gruenwald's Captain America and another in the last Invaders series; the Destroyer is the one with pinstripe pants and not the one from Thor; and I think they both appeared from Rick Jones' head during the Kree/Skrull War years and years ago...and that's all I've got, honestly. The cool thing is, Slott writes this up in a way that it doesn't matter if you've ever heard of these characters before, without having to eat up more pages than needed with exposition and origins. Tricky. It's something you notice when done wrong, more than praise when done right.
January 1945: A band of Nazi spies attempts to set up a transmitter on the Statue of Liberty, only to be stopped by the Blazing Skull. Skull looks like Ghost Rider, but in a red, mystery-man style costume of the period. The ringleader escapes in a plane that would be way to big to be inconspicuously landed next to the statue, or to take off quickly, but let's just say Skull is busy tying up the Nazis while rappelling one-handed.
The Skull's secret identity is Mark Todd, reporter for the Daily Globe, one of those comic newspapers that seems to have a circulation of 15 million, and like four employees total. Based on the Nazi's captured codebook and transmitters, he finds the next strike will be at a club in London; which gives Mark time to recap his origin on the plane ride over. It involves "Subteranean Skull Men" and "The burning Mask, which eventually became part of my own face!" but Mark doesn't seem really bent out of shape about it. Weird stuff happens.
Crashing the club, Mark is stopped by Lord Brian Falsworth, who's organized a fundraiser party that night. Mark convinces him that the club is a target pretty easily, so it's evacuated before a buzzbomb hits. The destruction is being filmed by armored Nazi the Iron Cross, (who looks so much like Iron Man you wonder what Tony's dad did during the war...) who has an old-style movie camera mounted on his shoulder.
Long-time Marvel readers would recognize Falsworth as Union Jack, who helps the Skull fight off Cross, and they recover the camera. And exchange information about their powers.
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