STRONGER THAN EVER!!!!

 
The Inferior Four weren't really stronger than ever. 

Cap, however, was.

One of Englehart's earliest efforts at Marvel, that showcased his tendency to incorporate pulp fiction/superhero cliches into his storylines without really reflecting on their reality all that much. Fortuately, Steve E grew out of this (Marv Wolfman, for example, never did). But in this issue, when Cap and Falc manage to track down the Ass-Kicked Quartet in the abandoned warehouse where they're hiding out, somehow or other, Plantman manages to get the best of both of them (I know - I can't believe it, either), having a mutated vine crush both into unconsciousness. At this point, instead of just jumping up and down on the heroes' heads until they go squish, the Braindead Barbershop calls up their fearless leader, the Cowled Commander (right hand to God, that's what he called himself) and at that point, I imagine the dialogue went something like this:

CC: What? Are you drunk? Why didn't you just kill the fuckers?
PLANTMAN: Uh, hey. I'll rob jewelry stores and shit and block streets with big plants and what not but killing an Avenger is over my paygrade, dude.
PORCUPINE: Yeah plus Cap saved my dad's whole division in the Big One and...
CC: Oh fucking please. Hands up everyone whose dad was saved by Cap in WWII.
(All four villains grudgingly put their hands up.)
CC: Yeah, okay, me too, but he's still got to GO. Okay. So stick him in the steel lined room with the poison gas jet inside it. You know, the one with the big two way television screen in it, so I can taunt him and that bird guy while they're choking to death.
SCARECROW: Boss, we're in an abandoned warehouse. There isn't any steel lined vault with...
EEL: Found it.
PLANTMAN: Goddamn, there really is one.
CC: Standard feature of all abandoned warehouses used for supervillain quarters. Okay. Stick 'em in there and I'll give 'em the gas and you won't have to worry about killing 'em.
PORCUPINE: (scrutinizing comic book) Fine, but... flipping ahead here, it seems you're actually Patrol Sergeant Brian Muldoon and you organized this whole crime wave thing to 'weed out the weak sisters in the force' and 'give the good cops something to battle against, a cause to rally around'.
CC: So?
PORCUPINE: It seems out of character for you to cold bloodedly murder two guys with poison gas, is all. If you're really a cop. I mean, sorry, I don't mean to question you, it just seems strange.
CC: Goddamit, you read the comic. Cap's got super strength now. He's just gonna rip the vault door off its hinges and pummel you guys into unconsciousness. Okay?
PLANTMAN: Well, I admit, I'm relieved.
EEL: Insh'allah.
SCARECROW: The Lord moves in mysterious ways. Okay, boss, we'll toss 'em in the vault.

Englehart would become a more thoughtful plotter over the coming years, although, really, even in what was perhaps his finest arc ever, the universe conquering scheme of Kang the Conqueror always seemed rather hallucinatory to me. Grabbing the Celestial Madonna, raping her into submission, fathering 'The One', and through him, RULING THE HEAVENS... I don't know. There's a lot that could go wrong there. Even if whoever the Madonna actually is doesn't kick your dick up out your left ear (and given that it was apparently either Mantis, Wanda, or Agatha Harkness, I'm thinking it's probably a bad idea getting naked with ANY of those chicks if they don't like you), well, if "The One" is going to 'rule the heavens', what the fuck makes you think he's going to listen to ol' Dad, the rapist in the blue bozo mask? Why wouldn't he just boot you into Jupiter's gravity well without your forcefield and chuckle as you steadily get flatter and flatter? Honestly, this whole idea seems very sketchy. Personally I'd stick with an orbital array of mind control satellites. That seems much more workable.

The Falcon-werewolf and the Fury

Captain America #164 -- the absolute nadir of Englehart's run on the title, and the reason is very simple -- the artwork of the ever execrable Alan Weiss, who apparently thinks Nick Fury wears Conan the Barbarian's clothes to work at SHIELD.

Weiss is one of those dreadful artists who just does everything wrong. His anatomy is harrowing and hideous, his proportions are awful, his facial expressions range from queasy to psychotic, his panel compositions are appalling, and he's got the visual storytelling skills of nearly anything listed in MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL that floats in water. ("Churches. Cider. Very small rocks. Gravy. Lead, lead!")

Perhaps put off his tucker by the ghastly graphics Weiss turned in for this issue, Englehart's scripting is lukewarm to say the least. Fortunately, this issue is really an isolated one off and the discerning True Believer can skip right over it without missing much -- and next issue, Salubrious Sal Buscema is back in fine form, inked by the always awesome Frank McLaughlin.

(Thankfully, by the time the next issue came out, some editor had emerged from his drunken stupor and instructed Sal to draw Nick Fury the way Nick Fury is supposed to be drawn, leaving Marveldom Assembled to wonder if we'd all somehow been exposed to some kind of low level skin contact hallucinogen while reading the previous issue.)

The Yellow Claw stories in Cap are hardly a highlight , and when I reread my Englehart runs I tend to skim through them. There are some genuinely horrific moments early on -- the Claw hypnotizing some Chinese soldiers into shooting themselves, and then sending giant spiders to attack Manhattan, and summoning up the spirit of a ruthless Egyptian princess to inhabit the body of his niece Suwan is all chilling stuff. But there's too much easy plot convenience nonsense too -- the Claw can apparently quite casually use his mental powers long distance to make Cap and Nick Fury see each other as the Claw and battle each other to the death, and if he can do that, how the fuck did the 50s Avengers ever manage to defeat him? How has anyone? And then, later on, when he captures Cap and the Falcon, instead of just killing them, he rigs up one of these wildly improbably supervillain death traps, which, naturally, they manage to escape from.

(Villains putting captured, unconscious heroes into badly conceived death traps instead of just, you know, jumping up and down on their masked heads until those same heads go squish, has always been one of the stupider staples of comic books. A year or so before this, when battling the minions of the Cowled Commander, Cap and Falcon were captured and rendered unconscious by the Plantman -- yeah, I know, seriously? But, yes -- and instead of just having his dipshit hirelings -- Scarecrow, the Eel, and the Porcupine, in addition to the aforementioned Plantman -- shoot our hapless heroes in the brains, he orders them locked up in a steel lined room rigged with a cool looking nozzle thingie and a close circuit TV. This so the Cowled Commander can rant at our two heroes after they wake up, just prior to filling their cell with poison gas.

This wasn't the dumbest thing Englehart ever did with a villainous warehouse HQ -- the 'abandoned warehouse' that just happens to have a steel lined room equipped to fatally gas captive superheroes would be outdone shortly thereafter when Taurus lured some rebellious members of the criminal Zodiac into a warehouse in New Jersey -- THAT JUST HAPPENED TO BE A SPACE SHIP!!!!!

But, still, the point here isn't the fabulous furnishings and equipage of the abandoned warehouses in the Marvel and DC Universes, but, rather, the sheer boneheaded brainlessness of managing to knock the superheroes out cold and then putting them into some contrived situation they will inevitably escape from, instead of just murdering them while they're helpless.

Of course, in a different article somewhere else on the internet, I once posited that many supervillains might not be actual cold blooded murderers, and therefore they might well contrive these traps so they can feel like they themselves didn't kill anyone with their actual hands. In the case of Captain America, I even find it likely that many supervillains might sneakily admire him and not want to kill him -- he may well have saved the lives of all four of the Fucked Up Four's fathers in WWII, after all. And more coldbloodedly calculating bad guys may well reflect that it's all fun and games going on crime sprees and robbing jewel stores and having fist fights with their opposite numbers on the side of law and order -- but if one of them ever DID actually kill Captain America, the entire superheroic and law enforcement apparatuses of the U.S. would descend upon their heads like shrieking furies.

As a final note of utter ludicrousness, I will point out that the Cowled Commander, who cheerfully tried to kill Captain America and the Falcon with poison gas, was, in reality, police sergeant Brian Muldoon, who created a supervillain persona to weed out the weak sisters in the police force and give the good cops an evil to fight, and a cause to rally around. However, I'm not going to put all the blame for this truly planet killing level of stupidity on Steve Englehart, as the Muldoon character, and, possibly, the Cowled Commander himself, were created by Gerry Conway.)

Okay. Deep breath, and back to the Yellow Claw silliness...

It was all silly enough to trouble even my adolescent self, and when I reread this stuff now I just have to snort at it. Once the Claw story was done, and we got past a badly scripted one issue Roy Thomas story introducing the son of Baron Zemo, we get to the start of the Moonstone/Secret Empire story, which leads into the Nomad story, which leads to the final Red Skull story and the death of Roscoe, which is all simply the best Captain America has ever been.

But that Weiss one shot is still really hard to deal with.