Previous Posts: Introduction | Chapter 1: Lee/Kirby Part 1 | Chapter 2: Lee/Kirby Part 2 | Chapter 3: The Roy Thomas Era (1966-1968) | Chapter 4: The End of the Silver Age (1968-1970) | Chapter 5: Origins and Flashbacks Part 1 | Chapter 6: Silver Age Flashbacks Part 2 | Chapter 7: X-Men: First Class Vol 1 | Chapter 8: X-Men: First Class Vol 2 Part 1 | Chapter 10: The Hidden Years | Chapter 11: X-Men on Hiatus (1970-75) | Chapter 12: The Champions Part 1 (1975-76) | Chapter 13: The Champions Part 2 (1977-78) | Chapter 14: The College Years (1978-83) | Chapter 15: The New Defenders Part 1 (1983-84)
After JM DeMattias left New Defenders, Peter Gillis took over writing duties, and the book continued to lean even harder into attempts at social commentary and questioning sexual and gender roles with a lengthy subplot about Bobby’s relationship with his teammate Cloud. As we’ll see, it has mixed results.
New Defenders #132 (June 1984)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin
Iceman saves the day when a gamma-irradiated plant-monster attacks the New Defenders’ headquarters.
The story starts with Iceman and Cloud playfully flirt-fighting but Moondragon cuts through the bullshit and assesses the situation correctly. She is a mind-reader, after all.
New Defenders #133 (July 1984)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Alan Kupperberg
The Defenders go to San Francisco and blunder into a completely unrelated story about Chinatown gangs and detectives Cutlass and Typhoon. This reads like a terrible backdoor pilot for a series that never launched.
New Defenders #134 (August 1984)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Alan Kupperberg
The Defenders are attacked in their home by low-level telepathic assassin Manslaughter.
Before the story begins, Warren cajoles Bobby into watching a women’s aerobics show like a couple of pervs. This was a whole genre of television in the 1980s.
Probably the most notable thing about the issue is the final panel, where Cloud declares her love for a rather confused Moondragon. This kicks off a long story about Cloud’s sexuality and gender that we’ll get into next issue. I’m honestly very surprised that this was allowed in a code-approved book at all in 1984.
New Defenders #135 (September 1984)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin
While local bigots fume over Angel and the Defenders living above their town, a factory owner hires mutant pyromaniac Blow Torch to burn down his business and kill all the undocumented Mexican women who work there so as to avoid difficult questions from the government. I dunno, that plan seems like it would raise more suspicions than it would quell!
Cloud has a little scene where she worries to herself about all the terribly wrong feelings she’s having for Moondragon.
To be honest, it’s not at all clear to me that Gillis wants us to sympathize with Cloud’s difficult coming out process, or if we’re meant to agree with her assessment that her feelings are “so wrong, so unthinkable!”
New Defenders #136-137 (October-November 1984)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin
The Defenders fight an unnamed Afghan wizard who’s taken control of Gargoyle, believing him to be a demon. The book is called The Defenders, after all. I guess we can’t expect them to be too proactive.
Meanwhile, Cloud has a dream conversation where Moondragon tells her that her feelings for her aren’t wrong. “It can’t be wrong, unless you think it’s wrong–!” Incredibly progressive for 1984! But then, on the next page, Cloud is suddenly a man, who’s saying “I can love you Moondragon – everything that was wrong is now right!” So close! Moondragon seems less than impressed (again, Moondragon is a lesbian, as established in 2006).
Getting back to Bobby, well, he’s very unsupportive of the suddenly transgender (?? — I’m not sure this is the correct word for Cloud, as we’ll eventually see) Cloud, and he’s being so obnoxious about it that Valkyrie has to put him in his place — directly drawing the thematic link from the transgender experience to the mutant metaphor. Again, this is of a piece with Bobby’s past performative hostility to anything queer and jealousy of anyone who makes moves on women who have shown no interest in him.
New Defenders #138 (December 1984)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin
The Defenders recover from last issue’s fight after letting the wizard run off into the mountains for the forest service to find. Gargoyle tells Cloud all about Moondragon’s origin. The Defenders appoint Candy Southern as their leader/manager/CEO.
Cloud freaks out when she spontaneously turns back into a woman. Iceman goes to comfort her, but she rightly points out his hypocrisy by daring him to shake her hand after she transforms back into a man. He freaks out and leaves the room, but he has a moment where he starts to question his response to the situation.
New Defenders #139 (January 1985)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin
The Defenders shrug off an attack by Mantis (or was it an illusion from Moondragon?), then team up with Red Wolf to stop some Trolls that are terrorizing a small town. When Moondragon resists the temptation to remove her power-dampening headband, it proves her worthiness and the headband falls off on its own.
Iceman doesn’t get to do much in this issue, but he does spend much of the opening pages hanging out in his underwear with the rest of the team.
Angel develops a never-again-mentioned ability to talk to eagles, but it may just be Moondragon screwing with his mind.
Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner #3 (January 1985)
Writer: JM DeMattias and Bob Budiansky
Artist: Bob Budiansky
The New Defenders make a cameo appearance listening to Namor give his first speech at the United Nations.
I can’t help but feel that DeMattias is saying editorializing with the word choice he’s used to describe his former characters listening to Namor’s speech.
New Defenders #140 (February 1985)
Writer: Peter Gillis
Artist: Don Perlin
Moondragon brings half the New Defenders to investigate a mysterious, racially motivated assault the Midwest.
Ok, this is just an absolute monstrosity of a story, and there’s no getting around it. The villain, Daniel Shepard, is a white teenage boy who is accused of raping his English teacher, an older Black woman. When asked, he only tells people that he had to do it because he wanted to break peoples’ hearts.
The trial brings out an armed neo-Nazi group to protest, which, I guess gives the Defenders something to punch.
Then the victim spends a page describing in detail her assault, only for Moondragon to explain that her memory was false, and that Shepard’s actual assault simply forced her to relive a different traumatic experience from her youth. He did this simply so that he could then exorcise the trauma from her. He then proceeds to exorcise the trauma from everyone else in the courtroom before walking away.
This is presented as a happy ending, never mind that he terrorized a suffering Black woman. Never mind that it seems to imply that simply forgetting about past trauma is a healthy way to overcome it.
It’s not even internally consistent, with Shepard claiming right up to the end that he did rape his teacher and he did it because she was Black. Again, I am baffled how this story made it through the Comics Code, let alone through editorial.
Ugh. Meanwhile.
Bobby flat out tells Hank that the reason he chose not to go on the mission is because he’s uncomfortable around Cloud and her sex-switching. “I get so nervous when she’s a boy—” he says, before cutting himself off. What feelings are being stirred here, exactly?
Moondragon tells Cloud that Cloud’s attraction to her was the result of “subliminal sexual impulses” she was sending out to try to trick members of the team into removing her headband. She specifically mentions Iceman as being one of her targets, which explains his sexual thoughts about her. (Valkyrie is also bisexual, but perhaps she’s more resistant to Moondragon’s powers.)
And we check in with Beast’s girlfriend Vera once again, who spends two pages being upset at being stood up again and with the fact that Beast will, uh “flirt with everything this side of Boy George.” At this point, Vera has been in 20 years of stories about Hank running out on her.
Next week: The New Defenders have yet another gay staffer, Iceman’s confusion over Cloud boils over when we finally learn the real origin, and The New Defenders comes to an end.
Where to find these stories: Everything but the Prince Namor cameo is on Marvel Unlimited. The New Defenders issues were recently collected across The Defenders Epic Collection Vol 8-9. Up to issue #139 was collected in The Essential Defenders Vol 7.
I can’t tell if Gillis was trying to foreground social issues he didn’t fully understand or if he was pushing progressive issues as far as he could given the limitations at Marvel at the time. The stuff with Cloud’s gender seems like the latter, but yeah — that rape story is no good for so many reasons.
I love the story where Bobby dehydrates the plant monster. It feels like the first real moment of character growth for him in a long while. I’m not sure, but maybe it starts the ball rolling on the “slacker with Omega-level powers” angle?
Those Kevin Nowlan covers are stunning.
I have a little sympathy for the idea that Gillis may simply not have thought through the implications of the gender/sexuality politics he was exploring in these stories. They are, after all, 40 years old, and the general cultural understanding of transgender identities and sexuality has evolved so much, even in the last decade. Quite frankly, I think it’s a miracle that these stories were allowed *at all* at Marvel comics in the 1980s given the ultra-conservative climate of Marvel through the late 90s. But Marvel could also be pretty capricious about these issues — they allowed Northstar to come out in 1992, but wouldn’t let him be openly gay in a comic again until the Chuck Austen run of Uncanny X-Men a decade later. Scott Lobdell was forced to do some interesting tap-dancing around the subject in the 1994 Northstar mini.
I honestly think the rape story is so bad it shouldn’t even be included in reprints but I guess there some slight historical value in it.