MARVEL TWO IN ONE #58
To The Nth Power! (The Pegasus Project. Pt 6)
Writers: Mark Gruenwald, Ralph Macchio
Artists: George Perez, Gene Day
Letters: Costanza
Colours: Gafford
This story has a lot of special resonances for me. I had never read it before, but in some ways it sets up storylines that I was enjoying a decade later.
Marvel Two In One is sometimes regarded as the little brother of Marvel Team Up. And the concepts are broadly similar. Each teams a Marvel icon with a revolving cast of supporting characters. But while MTU featured Spider-Man, Marvel's biggest hitter of all, MTIO had to rely on a guy who did not even have his own solo title. Ben Grimm, the blue-eyed, brick-headed Thing of the Fantastic Four was always an unlikely lead.
This particular issue brings us to the end of The Pegasus Project storyline. (Also known as Project: Pegasus.) The Project itself had been around for some time already, and would continue on to new life in later stories. (A version of it even found its way into the MCU, as the institute where Solvieg was working on the Tesseract in the first Avengers movie.) The basic idea is that Pegasus is a futuristic super-laboratory, with a special focus on novel energy sources. It was the home to the original Cosmic Cube for a while.
I saw a tweet from Kurt Busiek recently, where he was discussing how when you take a character from a team book and give them a solo series, it is essential to get the supporting cast right. Ben's best friend, flatmates and ersatz family are the other members of the Fantastic Four and it probably felt that giving them a lot of space in a Thing title would just make it another FF book. But in Two In One, the supporting cast could be sublimated by the guest stars. And the guest stars could be just about anyone.
And what really makes Pegasus interesting is the supporting cast Gruenwald/Macchio and Perez assembled to work with Ben Grimm. Assembled Marvel second-stringers Black Goliath (who changes his name to Giant Man at Ben's suggestion) Quasar (formerly known as Marvel Man and here just beginning to develop into the character Gruenwald would later pen a galaxy-shaking solo series for) and sometime villain, sometime super-wrestler, Thundra as well as this issue's cover star The Aquarian, who until this point was known as Wundarr.
The cover stars for each part of the Pegasus Project arc were: Quasar, who had previously been part of the Falcon's abortive SHIELD super-team, Deathlok, who appears as a villain (and animated corpse) Giant Man, making his debut in that name, Thundra, who had previously only appeared in earlier issues of MTIO, Wundarr and The Aquarian who are both the same, very obscure, character.
In today's world, where guest stars often only seem to exist to drive sales, the logic of teaming up a member of the Fantastic Four with a series of Marvel's least famous is difficult to fathom, but it works. After all, it is hard to credit the idea that Wolverine or Spider-Man would be spending time working night shifts on security detail at Pegasus. The team we finish the story with has some potential, although with Ben heading back to the FF and the other members going into story limbo for various periods, this remains a teasing glimpse of what might have been.
A quick recap - a mysterious organisation known as the Nth Command has recruited Tom Lightner, a Pegasus staff member with a past as the super-villain Blacksun, to construct something called the Nth Projector inside the Pegasus base, with the aim of transporting the entire complex to another dimension. Pieces of the projector have been smuggled into Pegasus by various crooks over the previous five parts, including the original Deathlok and a team of lady wrestlers led by Thundra. Lightner was supposed to construct and activate the projector but instead used its powers to transform himself into the Nth Man, a being of incredible power and a "living dimensional vortex".
Meanwhile, Wundarr, an alien friend of Ben's, has been in a catatonic state since attempting to use his energy absorbing powers to draw on the power of the Cosmic Cube itself.
Wundarr was conceived by Stever Gerber, apparently as a parody of Superman, being sent to Earth as an infant from a dying world.
He has now woken, gained intelligence and renamed himself "the Aquarian". In this guise, he is a pacifist superhero with a power-dampening field. By 1979, it is not clear how many people were still genuinely hoping for the "Age of Aquarius" to begin, but Wundarr was perhaps Marvel's last attempt to jump on the hippy band wagon. He was not a huge hit.
The ultimate solution to the Nth Man problem is a good old team-up, with the various players literally joining hands to form a human chain, deposit themselves inside Lightner, and then disrupt his internal reality.
Perhaps the biggest surprise here is that George Perez was the regular series artist on this title at the time. New Teen Titans was just under a year away at time of publication, and Perez was about to explode onto the scene at DC. And here he is, providing art chores for a Thing team-up book with some of Merry old Marvel's most obscure characters. As you might expect, he does a fantastic job. His interpretation of Quasar* is particularly enjoyable, and is by far the best treatment the character had in his early years.
In fact here, as in Teen Titans, and later crossover events like Infinity Gauntlet and Crisis on Infinite Earths, Perez really shows his strength in working with large ensemble casts. It is a great strength of Perez that his characters are almost as recognisable in plain clothes as they are in costume.
The visual style of the Nth Man is innovative and lends itself to some great original page layouts.
The few scenes set in "a twilight ether beyond imagining" inside the Nth Man are suitably trippy, too.
Just think, if Marvel had decided to run with this group and kept Perez on art duties, who knows what might have happened?
To The Nth Power! (The Pegasus Project. Pt 6)
Writers: Mark Gruenwald, Ralph Macchio
Artists: George Perez, Gene Day
Letters: Costanza
Colours: Gafford
This story has a lot of special resonances for me. I had never read it before, but in some ways it sets up storylines that I was enjoying a decade later.
Marvel Two In One is sometimes regarded as the little brother of Marvel Team Up. And the concepts are broadly similar. Each teams a Marvel icon with a revolving cast of supporting characters. But while MTU featured Spider-Man, Marvel's biggest hitter of all, MTIO had to rely on a guy who did not even have his own solo title. Ben Grimm, the blue-eyed, brick-headed Thing of the Fantastic Four was always an unlikely lead.
I saw a tweet from Kurt Busiek recently, where he was discussing how when you take a character from a team book and give them a solo series, it is essential to get the supporting cast right. Ben's best friend, flatmates and ersatz family are the other members of the Fantastic Four and it probably felt that giving them a lot of space in a Thing title would just make it another FF book. But in Two In One, the supporting cast could be sublimated by the guest stars. And the guest stars could be just about anyone.
And what really makes Pegasus interesting is the supporting cast Gruenwald/Macchio and Perez assembled to work with Ben Grimm. Assembled Marvel second-stringers Black Goliath (who changes his name to Giant Man at Ben's suggestion) Quasar (formerly known as Marvel Man and here just beginning to develop into the character Gruenwald would later pen a galaxy-shaking solo series for) and sometime villain, sometime super-wrestler, Thundra as well as this issue's cover star The Aquarian, who until this point was known as Wundarr.
The cover stars for each part of the Pegasus Project arc were: Quasar, who had previously been part of the Falcon's abortive SHIELD super-team, Deathlok, who appears as a villain (and animated corpse) Giant Man, making his debut in that name, Thundra, who had previously only appeared in earlier issues of MTIO, Wundarr and The Aquarian who are both the same, very obscure, character.
In today's world, where guest stars often only seem to exist to drive sales, the logic of teaming up a member of the Fantastic Four with a series of Marvel's least famous is difficult to fathom, but it works. After all, it is hard to credit the idea that Wolverine or Spider-Man would be spending time working night shifts on security detail at Pegasus. The team we finish the story with has some potential, although with Ben heading back to the FF and the other members going into story limbo for various periods, this remains a teasing glimpse of what might have been.
A quick recap - a mysterious organisation known as the Nth Command has recruited Tom Lightner, a Pegasus staff member with a past as the super-villain Blacksun, to construct something called the Nth Projector inside the Pegasus base, with the aim of transporting the entire complex to another dimension. Pieces of the projector have been smuggled into Pegasus by various crooks over the previous five parts, including the original Deathlok and a team of lady wrestlers led by Thundra. Lightner was supposed to construct and activate the projector but instead used its powers to transform himself into the Nth Man, a being of incredible power and a "living dimensional vortex".
Meanwhile, Wundarr, an alien friend of Ben's, has been in a catatonic state since attempting to use his energy absorbing powers to draw on the power of the Cosmic Cube itself.
Wundarr was conceived by Stever Gerber, apparently as a parody of Superman, being sent to Earth as an infant from a dying world.
He has now woken, gained intelligence and renamed himself "the Aquarian". In this guise, he is a pacifist superhero with a power-dampening field. By 1979, it is not clear how many people were still genuinely hoping for the "Age of Aquarius" to begin, but Wundarr was perhaps Marvel's last attempt to jump on the hippy band wagon. He was not a huge hit.
The ultimate solution to the Nth Man problem is a good old team-up, with the various players literally joining hands to form a human chain, deposit themselves inside Lightner, and then disrupt his internal reality.
Perhaps the biggest surprise here is that George Perez was the regular series artist on this title at the time. New Teen Titans was just under a year away at time of publication, and Perez was about to explode onto the scene at DC. And here he is, providing art chores for a Thing team-up book with some of Merry old Marvel's most obscure characters. As you might expect, he does a fantastic job. His interpretation of Quasar* is particularly enjoyable, and is by far the best treatment the character had in his early years.
In fact here, as in Teen Titans, and later crossover events like Infinity Gauntlet and Crisis on Infinite Earths, Perez really shows his strength in working with large ensemble casts. It is a great strength of Perez that his characters are almost as recognisable in plain clothes as they are in costume.
The visual style of the Nth Man is innovative and lends itself to some great original page layouts.
The few scenes set in "a twilight ether beyond imagining" inside the Nth Man are suitably trippy, too.
Just think, if Marvel had decided to run with this group and kept Perez on art duties, who knows what might have happened?
*As far as I know, the next time Perez drew Quasar was in the infamous Infinity Gauntlet #2, where the colourist botched the costume completely. This episode also has Quasar talking to Epoch, although visually the character is drawn as Epoch's mother, Eon. By the time Epoch was "born", Quasar had changed his costume yet again. None of this is believed to be Perez's fault, of course.
Comments
Post a Comment