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A Time Of Titans!
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The previous issue of 'Super-Villain Team-Up' ended with a promise of "a new artist! a new writer! and a new direction from your humble house of ideas!" and while this one does indeed have a new creative team, it feels much more like a fill-in rather than a new direction. Bill Mantlo, King Of Fill-Ins, only stays for this one story, although "story" is perhaps a generous description as it basically consists of one long fight, with half a sub-plot flown in from an entirely different series altogether. At times the whole thing is so lightweight that it almost becomes comical!
It all starts right where the last issue left off, with Namor suddenly becoming a lot less sanguine about Doctor Doom murdering Attuma's jester. Doom is having none of this and makes to leave, but Namor hasn't finished.
This leads to a big fight which takes them most of the issue to sort out, with the two characters knocking seven shades of super-villainy out of each other. The fight is watched by a navy vessel which has come in search of the "energy accumulation" that the two are generating. The ship, it turns out, is carrying Simon Ryker, the mad scientist who eventually creates Deathlock, along with a body floating in a tank of Protogen Gel.
I don't know enough about Deathlock to say which version of the character this is meant to be, or even if it is Deathlock, and there's nothing in this story to explain what's going on or where this fits in continuity. This in itself is unusual, as other recent stories have gone out of their way to point out exactly where they fit in the general continuity.
Meanwhile Doom and Namor continue to fight, with Doom using his forcefield to tire his opponent out before retaliating. When he does, however, he discovers that Namor was only pretending to be knackered, and is still strong enough to throw Doom into the nearby ship.
Doom recovers in time to fight back, blasting Namor with an apparently fatal dose of "pure energy", but then is grabbed from behind by Ryker with some sort of Power Syphon.
This is a neat reversal of a trick which Doom has previously used on The Silver Surfer, and it provides enough power to bring Ryker's creature to life. We don't actually find out what that means, however, as Doom throws Ryker around and then, full of joy because he thinks he's killed Namor, flies away.
Namor, of course, isn't dead at all, and the issue ends with him bashing up some rocks in frustration. And then that's it, with no resolution to the the whole Ryker/Deathlock storyline, and none forthcoming in the following issue either. Apart from that the entire comic has been taken up with a single fight, almost as if it was, well, a fill-in while we wait for Steve Englehart to take over next time.
Before we get to that on this blog, however, the bi-monthly schedule of 'Super-Villain Team-Up' means we can fit in a three issue run of Doctor Doom guest-starring in Marvel's other team-up series, featuring the return of his time machine - next time!
link to information about this issue
posted 26/6/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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