Talking Heads
If Gerber was able to wring so much out of a comic about an unthinking swamp monster, what would his best superhero work look like? Superheroes, even of the Marvel variety, tended to solve problems with their fists, claws, or laser eye beams, rather than by using diplomacy or persuasion. The decade-old Marvel tradition of heroic introspection was certainly congenial to Gerber, but the types of conflicts in which superheroes engaged were almost as great a challenge as a protagonist with no sense of self. Gerber was able to make superheroes work, but only when they were disaffected d-listers who found romantic, melodramatic violence as absurd as Gerber did. Fortunately, in 1975 Gerber got the assignment to take over The Defenders.
First appearing in 1971, The Defenders were initially a triumvirate composed of Dr. Strange, the Incredible Hulk, and Namor the Sub-Mariner. None of them were team players (that was the point), but the stories were popular enough to land them their own title the following year. Their roster would expand and contract the next decade; by the time Gerber took over, Namor was gone, and the team’s core consisted of Strange, the Hulk, the Norse warrior woman known as the Valkyrie, and Nighthawk, a reformed villain and rich costumed adventurer with a jet-pack. Unlike the Avengers, the Defenders had no regular meetings or official leader (though Dr. Strange was de facto in charge), and billed itself as a “non-team.” During Gerber’s tenure, the Defenders would at times include Luke Cage, the Son of Satan, the Thing, the Red Guardian, Clea, Daredevil, and Yellowjacket, and would also team up with the original Guardians of the Galaxy. What they had in common (at least in the 1970s) was the standard heroic altruism combined with a tendency towards disaffection.
During his first year on the book, Gerber developed a firm grasp of the group’s dynamic, even if the stories did not always require this particular group of heroes to make it work. The five-part team-up with the Guardians of the Galaxy, though well-crafted, was the launching pad for the Guardians’ own series (also written by Gerber). [1] The three-part struggle with the racist Sons of the Serpent also could have involved virtually any Marvel hero, although it ended on a note that was important for Kyle Richmond’s (Nighthawk’s) growth as a character (Kyle discovers that the Serpents were funded by his own company, at the behest Alfred Pennysworth, his African American second-in-command).
Since Kyle and Valkyrie were the only two characters over whom Gerber had exclusive control, they were the ones he could most successfully develop. Prior to discovering Pennysworth’s crimes, Kyle had already been thrown for a loop by the car bombing that maimed his girlfriend and led to her departure. Valkyrie was Gerber’s focus from the very beginning, thanks to the unique challenges the warrior woman faced. Her body was that of Barbara Denton Norris, a cultist driven mad by an extra dimensional god, but her mind was an artificial persona crated by an Asgardian sorceress. Her ongoing identity crisis is only exacerbated by her discovery that Barbara had a husband, Jack, and that Jack refused to believe she was no longer Barbara. Jack would be a regular supporting character and near constant irritant until Gerber’s penultimate Defenders story.
At their best, The Defenders was not just metaphorically cerebral; it came close to being literally cerebral as well. Issue 21 (“Enter…the Headmen!”) was both a self-contained, if puzzling, story and the lead-in to the nearly yearlong storyline that capped Gerber’s tenure on the book. [2] The three Headmen of the title are obscure villains who each appeared in the publisher's pre-Marvel age science fiction horror comics: Arthur Nagan, whose experiments with interspecies organ transplants culminated in an ape rebellion and the grafting of his head on a gorilla body; Jerry Morgan, whose research into shrinking technology resulted in the miniaturization of his skull, but not the soft tissues that contained it; and Chondu the Mystic, a forgettable, minor-league guru. [3] Reviving these Z-listers was consistent with Gerber’s approach to superhero conflict; in Giant-Sized Defenders 3, he had the Hulk square off against a cute, tiny yellow antennaed telekinetic rather than a giant bruiser, and when the Defenders teamed up with Howard the Duck in “Five Villains in Search of a Plot” (Howard the Duck Treasury Edition) their antagonists were a ragtag team consisting of Dr. Angst (Master of Mundane Mysticism), Sitting Bullseye, Tillie the Hun, the Spanker, and Black Hole.
In their first appearance, the Headmen inject a chemical into the conveniently bald Chondu’s brain, which calls down a mystical “Black Rain” that drives all the sleeping residents of nighttime Manhattan into a furious, quasi-suicidal frenzy. Nighthawk is the only Defender who directly encounters a Headman; so surprised is he by Nagan’s grotesque appearance that the ape-man quickly trounces him. On the last page, the Defenders are left to wonder what, exactly, has just happened.
The Defenders (and their readers) would have to wait almost a year to find out. The eleven-issue storyline devoted in part to the Headmen would turn out to be one of Gerber’s most significant contributions to the budding self-awareness of the superhero genre, as well as his most complex exploration of subjectivity within the confines of stories about costumed heroes and villains. Taking both the name and the grotesque appearance of the Headmen as his cue, Gerber quite literally takes us inside his characters heads.
In the penultimate issue of the Headmen storyline, Jack Norris (the husband of the body the Valkyrie inhabits) tries to draw the Defenders’ attention to geopolitical and social ramifications of their enemies’ schemes, though the heroes’ blind spots and his own abrasiveness render his efforts futile: “[I]f you turkeys can’t punch a problem in the face—or life it out of the way—/—you’re just not interested, are you??” But Jack turns out to be right: the battle they face is one of ideas, one in which neither they nor their home genre are equipped to engage.
Jack is in the perfect position to realize this, and not only because he is a non-powered stand-in for the reader: thanks to the story's endless hijinks involving heads, minds, souls, and mind control, he is the only character who has actually witnessed the Headmen’s plans. For, just as the reader is implicitly invited to identify which the comics’ protagonists, Jack had his mind temporarily implanted into the body (but not the brain) of Kyle Richmond. In The Defenders, minds, brains, and selves all become dangerously fungible.
When the Headmen return in issue 31, Nagan drugs Nighthawk, brings him back to their base, and surgically removes his brain, replacing it with Chondu’s. For the next several months, Kyle is nothing more than a brain in a dish. Meanwhile, the Hulk has rescued a baby deer from hunters, after they shoot and killed his mother (“Men killed Bambi’s mother!”). When the Defenders discover that Nighthawk’s body no longer houses Kyle Richmond’s brain, Dr. Strange puts Jack’s mind in Kyle’s body, Chondu’s mind in “Bambi’s”, and “Bambi’s”…we never actually find out what happens to the consciousness of the baby faun. Strange’s gambit is appropriate, since swapping out Kyle’s brain was only the beginning of the Headmen’s head-themed plans. Their new member, Ruby, a woman who has replaced her own head with a malleable plastic red spherical supercomputer, knocks the Defenders unconscious, leaving them vulnerable to the Headmen’s machinations. But the Headmen do not torture them, or attempt to kill them; they don’t even engage in the sort of brainwashing or mind control that is fairly standard in superhero stories. Instead, Nagan uses “encephalo-transmogrifiers” to “perform a subtle alteration on our subject’s thought patterns./ When the process is completed, they’ll simply see things—more our way.” Jack/Nighthawk asks what they will do with him, and Nagan responds: “Then we let them go, of course—with you to accompany them!/ What possible use could they be to us otherwise?”
The alterations are so subtle that the Defenders attack the Headmen as soon as they awaken, leaving Jack and the readers to forget all about the procedure for the next several issues. Only much later does the Hulk find himself inexplicably breaking up a feminist anti-snuff film protest; Valkyrie, in a fit of temper, crushes a rock that had been thrown through Dr. Strange’s window by anti-communist fanatics, and Dr. Strange, annoyed by the pomposity of a politician on the campaign trail, casts a spell that causes the man’s pants to fall down while he is on stage. That appears to be the extent of the changes.[4]
As nefarious schemes go, this one is patently underwhelming. It makes for terrible superhero drama, which is precisely the point. Their ridiculous trappings aside, the Headmen have come together to reject the logic of the superhero genre. Unlike Dr. Angst and his team, they are not “five villains in search of a plot;” the are four villains in search of a way out of a stereotypical narrative framework. They are still villains—their solutions to the world’s problems are violent and coercive. In overpopulated Calcutta, they shrink the population by literally shrinking the population (to an adult height of about two inches).
Their interventions in the thought patterns of the Defenders are similarly odd. What could be gained by having Dr. Strange pants a politician? Only that he and his comrades have had their typical narrative patterns disrupted. They are not so much brainwashed as they are deturned—hijacked from their conventional contexts as if they were the targets of a Situationist prank.
As for Nighthawk, he did not have his thought patterns “subtly altered,” but his extended existence as a disembodied brain had a profound effect on him. Or rather, had the effect of forcing him to become profound. Before gaining his powers, Kyle Richmond had been an irresponsible rich boy (Nighthawk was designed as a parody of Batman), and Gerber used his years on the Defenders to force Kyle to grow up.
Gerber hit Kyle with tragedy after tragedy; first he discovers that his money is being used to support racist terrorists, then his girlfriend loses her arm in a car explosion and leaves him. Kyle loses his money (or at least, the pleasure from having it without guilt), his love, and now his body. A large part of issue 32 is devoted to Kyle’s reliving his old memories, showing the reader (and himself) all the ways in which he failed to be a functioning, responsible adult. When his brain is finally placed back in his body, he cannot simply ease back into his old routines. As he tells Dr. Strange in Issue 37, “Now I don’t now if this is real, or—help me!” His readjustment is further complicated by the nature of superhero adventuring. In the very next issue, now dressed as Nighthawk again, Kyle steps through a door and finds himself on another planet, watching as Dr. Strange and Luke Cage try to rescue their new comrade, the Red Guardian, from flesh-eating beetles: “Suddenly, his brain feels detached again.” At first, unable to get Strange’s attention, he appears to be on the verge of a breakdown “I need to know I’m okay—.”
Kyle’s words could apply to most of the characters in this Defenders storyline at some point or another. To make matters worse, the Headmen are not the only people trying to rearrange the furniture in people’s heads. Back when Jack Norris is still inhabiting Chondu’s brain in Nighthawk’s body, he flees the Headmen, carrying Kyle’s brain with him, only to be kidnapped by Nebulon, the Celestial Man. Nebulon, a would-be alien invader from the pre-Gerber Defenders, has attained enlightenment, which he now wishes to bring to humanity. Unfortunately, the only way he can do this is by kidnapping random humans, imprisoning them in a pseudo-Greek temple, and draining their mental energy until they die.
Where the Headmen are trying to change society, Nebulon, now disguising himself as a short, bald man in a suit, wants to raise people’s consciousness to a higher level. Despite their bizarre appearance, the Headmen are a familiar type: a shadowy cabal bent on world domination (albeit with a relatively light touch). Nebulon represents the phenomenon Gerber seemed to loathe above all: New Age California. Nebulon offers seminar in “Celestial Mind Control,”which seems to be a parody of both Scientology and EST/The Forum. As such, he is the perfect antagonist for Gerber’s model of the Defenders as encounter group. The Defenders have an effect on each other by virtue of their mutual emotional investment and the appreciation of each other’s individuality, while Nebulon’s philosophy is, quite literally, one size fits all. When the Hulk, Valkyrie, and Dr. Strange infiltrate his first seminar, they are treated to a little man haranguing his audience, berating them for “what a stinking mess you’ve made of everything so far.” The problem is that “you’re all Bozos!” Under each person’s seat is a bozo mask, which they all assent to put on. Celestial Mind Control’s first stage consists of confronting people with their true clownishness, assisted by women in cheerleader costumes chanting “B!O!Z!O! You’re a Bozo Bozo BOZO!” (Dr. Strange: “I […] find this a curious path to enlightenment.")
From its first appearance in issue 34 to the end of the story in Defenders Annual 1, Celestial Mind Control is mostly a background threat. Even Gerber must have found it difficult to make a comic out of superheroes beating up duped cultists dressed in clown masks. Frequent fights with Nebulon would defeat the point: when not in his human disguise, Nebulon is just another superpowered alien to put down. Nebulon is using Celestial Mind Control the same way the Headmen are advancing their own plans: by working behind the scenes and cultivation the powerful. In the story’s final installment, Dr. Strange intervenes in a meeting between Nebulon and President Gerald Ford, during which Strange and Nebulon shoot energy beams at each other while debating the merits of free will. Nebulon wins this round, and Ford is on the verge of making a public statement in support of Celestial Mind Control when Strange magically covers the president’s mouth with a metal muzzle: “Once more, Mr. President, my sincerest apologies. / But I think even my temper would be strained to the limits were you to deem us a nation of bozos.”
The story ends in a free-for all involving the Defenders, the Headmen, and Nebulon. The Defenders make quick work of the Headmen, in classic superhero style. As the narrator notes, “Sad, but true: all that’s left to say is a punch in the face.” [5] Not so for Nebulon; Strange uses the Eye of Agamotto to enter his antagonists’ mind and, in a twist on one of Stan Lee’s favorite trope, show him “what it is to be human!” Nebulon is treated to a montage of humanity’s greatest hits (“the sad and raucous, noble and perverse, heroic and foolhardy pageant of all mankind’s history”). Strange launches into an impassioned speech about man as a “creature whose most despicable qualities often resulting his most towering achievements”:
“Rob us of the fool, the adventurer, the scoundrel—in short, the bozo—in each of our souls—and we are nothing.“We attain our most glorious heights when we admit our ignorance…and forge onward to surround it.
“Perhaps this classes us as anomalies in the universe, but—“
Luckily for the reader, Nebulon cuts him off: “Enough, Strange! I concede! Your race is beyond redemption! And so I hereby aboard my efforts—to—/ Farewell, Strange!”
Nighthawk is nonplussed: “Th-that’s it? He surrendered because he figures we’re a hopeless case?”
As distastefully inane as Celestial Mind Control might have been, it was centered on the figure of the Bozo in order to overcome him, Or at least, that’s how it seems by the last two pages; before that, Gerber did not elaborate on CMC’s goals enough to lead to this conclusion. But in a book whose final point is about the necessity of imperfection, it seems a bit churlish to dwell on the the flaws. Instead, we should consider Gerber’s spin on 1960s Marvel humanism. The message is not that different from the conclusions drawn by the Silver Surfer. The real difference is in the metaphor used for humanity’s imperfections: the Bozo is inherently absurd, stepping outside of the typical Marvel humanist binary of the “noble” vs. the “base.” The Bozo is a different kind of antonym to the noble: he is an embarrassment.
He is also a comic book character. Note the synonyms for Bozo used by Dr. Strange: the fool, the adventurer, the scoundrel. These are the heroes and villains of adventure tales. The Valkyrie is an adventurer, while the Hulk (who spent two issues of The Defenders raving about Bambi) is a good fit for the fool. The scoundrel could be the villain, or he could also be the shameful past of a current hero (like Nighthawk). Indeed, this helps justifies the attention pain to Kyle’s pre-Nighthawk biography. Kyle Richmond (the Defender with whom Nebulon has the closest connection) is a living example of Strange’s thesis about “despicable qualities” that eventually lead to “towering achievements.” Gerber’s warmed-over humanism works better as a justification for his continued commitment to a genre whose absurdities he cannot ignore even as he retains a clear (and clear-eyed) affection for it. He has spent a year on The Defenders getting into his characters’ heads and doubling down on their imperfections and reveling in the ridiculousness of superhero plots. Jim Starlin had Adam Warlock rage against the “diamonds in the garbage,” but Gerber accepted both. Or, as Dr. Strange concludes on the last page, “Let us, if only for a moment, be Bozos one and all, eh?"
Note
[1] It wasn’t even the first such vehicle; Gerber re-introduced the Guardians in a two-part Marvel-Two-in-One story (issues 4 and 5) that set the stage for Giant-Size Defenders 5 and Defenders 26-29.
[2] The story ran from Issues 31-40 and concludes in Defenders Annual 1. Gerber only wrote more one Defenders issue after that (41).
[3] These three men appeared in three different comics: Mystery Tales 21 (September 1954), World of Mystery 11 (April 1958), and Tales of Suspense 9 (May 1960). Their stories were reprinted together in Weird Wonder Tales 7 (1974), which is probably where Gerber got the idea to use them (he even challenged his readers in Defenders 21’s letter column to figure out what comic all three of them had appeared in before).
[4] Curiously, there is never a moment when these changes are undone. Technically, the alterations to the Defenders’ minds are then permanent, even though they are never brought up again. Most likely, this is a plot thread Gerber simply neglected to address.
[5] Though Jack Norris does note at the end that “all this punching and kicking still hasn’t beaten the Headmen.” Dr. Strange brushes him off: “untangling their economic and political web can wait."