So there I was, in the summer of 1985, just getting into the groove of a regular comics buying habit. I was ten, almost eleven, old enough to be given $5 every Saturday morning to do with whatever I pleased, and also old enough to be trusted to ride my bike halfway across town to a convenience store that sold candy and soda and comics. A new issue of Spider-Man came out once a month, which meant if I went to the store every Saturday, one of those times I’d be able to get the newest Spider-Man, but the other three weekends I’d have to choose something else to read. Or maybe nothing! Marvel comics cost 65 or 75 cents an issue at that point, so my $5 weekly bacchanal might consist of one comic, one can of Coke, and a Milky Way bar, or two comics, a package of Twinkies and a bottle of Yoo-hoo, or no comics, a 7-Up Gold, a bag of Combos, and a couple packs of Garbage Pail Kids. One never knew, but I’d almost always have change left over for my piggy bank back home.
Anyway, I biked over to the store that fateful day and I saw the most garish, attention-grabbing cover I had ever seen in my young life. A searing pinkish-magenta background with almost a dozen superheroes exploding toward the viewer! Said heroes garbed in a riot of colors, including an orange-clad yellow-caped strongman and another in quadrants of yellow, red, blue and green! An ominous, dark figure looming in the background! And a logo promising that this would be the greatest epic ever:
This issue cost $1.25 all on its own, but I had to have it. It was arguably worth the cover price purely based on the fact that it was a double-sized extravaganza kicking off the maxi-series, though I would argue it had artistic merits of its own which also justified the cost. Because the Squadron Supreme series, I was about to learn as I turned its pages, was about heroes failing. Not failing in act two only to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and prevail in act three, but having already failed when the stakes were highest. It was a story about picking up the pieces after an unimaginable loss, trying to put things right, and arguably making things worse and failing again.
I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Behind the cover was a splash page where Hyperion is trying and (you guessed it) failing to prevent the Squadron Supreme’s satellite headquarters from plummeting to Earth. He settles for a controlled crash in the ocean.
Then he meets up with some of his teammates who all look like they’ve been through hell, costumes torn, expressions somber. The story moves around to other members of the team in different locations and gives a sense of how bad things are around the US and the world: food shortages, power outages, violent anarchy. The entire Squadron assembles in an older HQ in the mountains and compares notes.
Here, I will note, they recap how they got to this point, defeated and taking stock of a world on the brink, and footnotes explain that this was a storyline in The Defenders about three years earlier. I was unaware of this storyline (Defenders was a cool, weird series I learned to appreciate later but hadn’t gotten into at all as of age ten-almost-eleven); for that matter I was unaware of any of the Squadron’s previous appearances or incarnations, which I talked about in a previous installment to provide context to you the reader even though I lacked it myself. At any rate, the recap did its job just fine and I got the gist. It made sense that there had been a storyline in the standard Marvel continuity where heroes from an alternate Earth had been brainwashed by villains who conquered that alternate Earth, then turned their sights on the main Marvel Earth and the Defenders had to defeat and unbrainwash the alternate heroes, then go help them liberate their alternate Earth. In that storyline, the Defenders saved the day, standard superhero stuff.
Mark Gruenwald, the writer of the Squadron Supreme limited series, was a genius to me for seeing the potential in a sequel to the Defenders story, told from the alternate Earth’s point of view. It’s one thing to say that a parallel world was subjugated by an intergalactic despot when that’s just a colorful bit of backstory on the Villain of the Month. But to then return to that parallel world and center its heroes as the protagonists was a bold stroke. The thing about ongoing monthly superhero adventures is that they maintain the status quo and the villain’s plans to conquer the world never come to fruition because the good guys prevail in the end. Gruenwald dug deep into the possibilities of breaking that mold, and I found that utterly captivating.
And then of course what made it even better was the fact that this was clearly a riff on DC’s biggest superheroes. I immediately realized that this was what that house ad I had taunted my brother with really meant. OK, fine, so Marvel hadn’t acquired the rights to Superman and Batman and Green Lantern. But Hyperion is clearly a re-skinned Superman, Nighthawk is unmistakably Batman by another name, Doctor Spectrum is Green Lantern with his sector ID filed off. Except it’s even better than that, because if Marvel had started publishing Superman, people would more or less expect him to remain Superman with all of his tropes and trappings intact. Gruenwald, by using characters that were minor in the grand scheme of Marvel things, was able to have his cake and eat it too, telling a Justice League of America story that went truly off the rails, where Superman breaks up with Lois Lane forever and winds up falling in love with Wonder Woman, where Batman in his civilian identity is elected President of the United States, where Black Canary dumps Green Arrow for Hawkman which drives Green Arrow crazy enough to electronically brainwash Black Canary, get caught out, and become a villain. This combination of messing with DC archetypes and doing with them what DC would never dare do was extremely appealing to a partisan like me who had long since chosen Marvel over DC.
Back to the issue itself: the heroes are all grappling with the fact that yes, with the Defenders’ help, they punched away the problem of the supervillain, however, this did not solve the corollary problems the supervillain’s conquest caused which have left Earth a post-apocalyptic mess. Those problems, the infrastructure collapse, the riotous lawlessness, can’t be solved by punching. But can they be solved by superheroes in any way? Power Princess comes from a place literally called Utopia Isle, so she at least has a blueprint for fixing the world. Tom Thumb is an off-the-charts technological genius. The Whizzer’s superspeed lets him cover the entire globe to gather intel and coordinate efforts in real time. They feel responsible for letting the world down and want to atone, not just by restoring the way things used to be but by making a better world, free of crime, free of poverty, free of all of mankind’s ills.
Well, most of them want to. They debate this for a while, with Amphibian doubtful that it’s feasible and Nighthawk fearful that the only way to succeed will be to take over the world themselves, because a world devoid of problems is also a world devoid of freedom. This was pretty heady stuff for a ten year old! But I was enthralled by it all the same. In the end they vote, ten in favor and Amphibian and Nighthawk opposed. Amphibian accepts the outcome. Nighthawk rage quits, but he does agree to arrange a press conference where two things will happen: Kyle Richmond (Nighthawk’s secret ID) will resign as POTUS, and Hyperion and the rest of the Squadron will reveal and abandon their secret ID’s and announce the Utopia Program.
The rest of the issue is the Squadron squaring away their personal lives as they are about to dedicate themselves to being round-the-clock world savers, and Richmond plotting to assassinate Hyperion at the press conference because he assumes the Squadron will abandon the Utopia Program if they lose their superman leader. The press conference happens, Richmond resigns, Hyperion gives a speech introducing the Utopia Program, and Richmond has a gun in his pocket loaded with an argonite bullet, aimed at Hyperion’s back, but at the last minute can’t pull the trigger, not because he second-guesses his suspicions, but because he doesn’t want to go down in history as the man who murdered the world’s greatest superhero. So the Squadron unmasks and the Utopia Program begins.
It’s a lot for a single issue, even one that’s double-sized, but that’s a good thing because with the whole debate-to-near-assassination arc for Nighthawk it feels like it tells a reasonably satisfying story while also setting up the longer narrative. It’s a fantastic first chapter of a novel.
What’s crazy is that I was so hooked by issue #1, I wanted to ride this train so badly, which meant definitely getting to the convenience store every month, on the specific week that new issues would come out, for an entire year. You will be shocked to learn that this proved impossible for a ten/eleven-year old. After re-reading issue #1 so many times it almost disintegrated, I managed to pick up #2. Then missed #3. Then got #4, which did a pretty good job of bringing me up to speed on what I missed, then got #5 and I think maybe #6? Then I hit a rough patch where I missed several issues, but I did manage to come back at the end and see how it all wrapped up in #12. I honestly cannot remember if I got my hands on #10 from the newsstand, or if I acquired it some time later to retro-fill the gap. Because that’s the thing about this pivotal maxi-series: it hearkens to a time when I was evolving from ‘casual fan’ to ‘devoted fan’ but had not yet reached the higher level of ‘obsessive collector’. We will get there, my friends. We will get there.
