CSBG Archive

A Year of Cool Comic Book Moments – Day 156

Here is the latest cool comic book moment in our year-long look at one cool comic book moment a day (in no particular order whatsoever)! Here‘s the archive of the moments posted so far!

Today, we look at Tom DeFalco and Ron Wilson’s famous “boxing” Annual of Marvel Two-in-One.

Enjoy!

Marvel Two-in-One Annual #7 was produced by DeFalco and Wilson and it told the tale of the Elder of the Universe known as the Champion, who showed up on Earth to challenge the most powerful heroes on the planet to box him. If they all lose, he will destroy the Earth.

Here, DeFalco chose to highlight a difference between Thing and the other, more powerful heroes like Thor and the Hulk. The Thing actually knew how to BOX.

And DeFalco and Wilson handled the boxing scenes beautifully, all introduced by a wonderful panel by Wilson below…

Then the Thing enters the ring, as the last hope of the Earth…

The fight has not gone well, but the Thing has managed to stay in the ring, which all the other heroes could not do. And then we get the ending of the fight…

That sure is the Thing to the tee!

Good work by the creators.

“The” moment is probably the bit where he drags himself across the ground to say he’ll never give up.

Travis

Actually, he showed up once in a Deus-Ex-Machina to let the Silver Surfer leave earth (back in the day when he was Earth bound)… It really sorta ticked me off… I always liked that character, and they had him for one page just to give Norrin a reason for leaving, and his powers back.

dhole

I remember Champion’s appearance in the Silver Surfer no. 1 that Travis refers to. As I recall, the Silver Surfer defeated him quite easily, which bugged me, as it kind of took the wind out of the sails of the big bad in this annual.

Of course, my favorite parts of this annual were the guest-appearances by all the other strong guys. Sasquatch was sure making lots of guest appearances back then! (before regular exposure in the Alpha Flight series).

Gricomet

The Champion has appeared quite a bit over the years considering. He has the power infinity gem often, so he appeared in the Infinity Gauntlet build up series Thano’s Quest (a sweet 2 issue mini) and he ended up being important in the 2nd half of Slott’s first She-Hulk series. (Fighting her, and then being the mysterious benefactor-ish for an older She-hulk villain). He’s an enjoyable pure fighting character,

Dean

You figure there are 4-5 “pure” sub-genres (Siegel-Shuster, Bob Kane, Lee-Kirby, Lee-Ditko and Julie Schwartz of supero comics. That plus the 5-6 genres that used stand alone, buy now are mostly mashed up into superheroes (monster, romance, crime, western, space opera, even humor). For example, Ghost Rider is a Lee-Ditko Western mash-up.

Every one of these massive cross-overs is a Lee-Kirby Space Opera mash-up. By extension, every title that crosses into those titles winds up in that same sub genre. There are two big problems with this :
1. The vast majority of the oupit of the Big Two are concentrated in a super narrow sub genre. It does not take a big shift in the markeplace to collapse their business model.
2. Marvel is a lot better at making those types of comics than DC. DC got lucky once 25 years ago with the first Crisis, but have little luck since. Why are they still focused on something they are bad at?

Cahse

Excellent issue. And Ellis is right; this was used as the basis for a Dial M for Monkey ep. In fact, they actually used the Champion’s speech! Tom DeFalco was given a writing credit for the episode because of that.

Because of this, I always read the Champion as Macho Man Randy Savage…

chad

that story and moment showed that no matter if the thing is out matched in strength that his true power lies in never backing down for even the champion relized that if the fight continued Ben would just continue till he was a corpse.

JackKing

Pedro Bouça

Great comic (and great animated adaptation on “Dial M for Monkey “!), but the Champion became more and more of a pushover with every later appearance. I think next time he will be beaten by Power Pack…

“I remember Champion’s appearance in the Silver Surfer no. 1 that Travis refers to. As I recall, the Silver Surfer defeated him quite easily, which bugged me, as it kind of took the wind out of the sails of the big bad in this annual.”

That was probably the LESSER issue I have with that comic. I had been wanting a new Silver Surfer series for what seemes like AGES (the original Lee/Buscema series – which I got in reprints, I’m not that old – being my all-time favorite classic Marvel series) and got that thing. Inconsistent, EXTREMELY badly written and with probably the poorest art the late, lamented Marshall Rogers did on his whole career.

I think that was the first time I thought a comic offended my intelligence. Sadly wouldn’t be the last.

David B

I loved that Dial-M-For-Monkey cartoon on Dexter’s Laboratory. Randy Macho-Man Savage was the voice of the champion. He beat all the superheros except for Monkey, who wouldn’t quit. It was hilarious. He even repeats the “Crush your bones, break your body” line at the end.