LONGSHOT: ONE OF MARVEL’S WTF? HEROES

This weekend’s light-hearted, escapist superhero post here at Balladeer’s Blog will look at Longshot, who has been repeatedly memory-wiped, rebooted, repurposed, retconned and has even been a mutant, then NOT a mutant.

LONGSHOT Vol 1 #1 (September 1985)

Title: A Man Without a Past

Villains: Mojoverse humanoids and creatures

Synopsis: Readers are dumped into events as this issue opens. A mulleted man we will come to know as Longshot is being pursued through a bizarre alternate dimension which we will come to know as the Mojoverse. His pursuers are menacing humanoids armed with rayguns, and oddly formed creatures, some of whom can talk. 

At length, Longshot escapes through a random portal and ends up on Earth. We readers learn he has lost his memory and has two hearts and only three fingers and a thumb on each hand. His first superpower (aside from his incredible agility) is revealed to be incredible “luck” and that luck prevented his pursuers’ blaster fire from actually hitting him and instead hitting everything around him.

NOTE: To clarify that, this was a period in the 1980s when Marvel was experimenting with more and more characters whose powers affected probability fields, or “luck.” Longshot was one, the villainesses called the Black Cat and Roulette were two others, the Irish superheroine Shamrock was another, and so was the female mercenary Domino (seen in Deadpool 2).

           I’m not thrilled with that whole concept as a “superpower” (except maybe in a video game) but what can ya do? Those characters became very popular.

Back to the story, Longshot descends from the portal onto a busy city street in upstate New York, where he immediately saves a little old lady from being hit by a car. He agilely gets her to safety against all odds. A curious crowd gathers and our hero, not knowing where he is (but understanding English) runs off in confusion, especially over the reaction from ladies.

Another of Longshot’s characteristics was revealed in that incident. His “luck” (sigh) makes him very attractive to women, setting up some incidents that people in future decades would get very upset about regarding his relationships with women.

Longshot was created and written by a woman, however, and in the 80s his irresistible appeal to women was presented as a campy, humorous quirk, like a superhero teen idol or such. It was similar to the way that Will Eisner’s hero the Spirit was always mobbed by infatuated ladies. In fact, my recent look at the Spirit got me thinking of Longshot. 

Anyway, a regulation “wacky street guy” named Eliot has observed all of the above and tags the interdimensional being with the nom de guerre Longshot. With cops still chasing our hero over the chaos following him saving the old lady, a young female shopkeeper tries to flirt with Longshot. (Look, just have him run through the streets being pursued by lovesick ladies while Can’t Buy Me Love plays, already!)

Not understanding Earth ways, our main character takes things from stores without paying and gets even more cops on his tail. His leaping and swinging around lets him elude them all. Overnight in a nearby park, a talking doglike beast (see cover) from his own dimension reveals that it has followed him to Earth through the portal.

We readers also learn that Longshot’s bandolier holds multiple hand-sized throwing blades that are made of alien metal which can penetrate anything. Naturally, his “luck” means he hits anything he aims at.

Reuniting with Eliot and meeting a crying young mother named Hester, Longshot learns her child was just abducted and he offers to find them. He touches a baby doll that Hester and the kidnappers had held and we learn that another of our blonde hero’s powers is psychometry. (See what I mean about him being a WTF? hero?)

The psychometric impressions that Longshot got from the baby doll reveal that she was taken by some of his Mojoverse pursuers who want to sacrifice the baby to make another portal so they can return to Mojoworld. They also reveal where they went, and Longshot follows their trail, with Hester and Eliot tagging along.

The abductors are caught up with, and Longshot does battle with them in order to free the baby. The multi-armed female warrior called Spiral is among the villains (she’ll become very important), and they all taunt Longshot about his missing memories.

We readers learn that our hero’s “luck” won’t work for him if his motives aren’t “pure.” Once he stopped fighting to free the baby and instead tried forcing the villains to tell him about his past, he started losing. Now trying JUST to rescue the infant, he defeats the abductors and saves the baby, but the villains escape.

Longshot says goodbye to Hester, her baby and Eliot. He and the talking Mojoverse “dog” Gog depart into the night.

LONGSHOT Vol 1 #2 (October 1985)

Title: I’ll Wave to You from the Top

Villains: Gog and other creatures from the Mojoverse

Synopsis: This issue picks up a day or two after the end of the previous issue. Longshot and his still-growing Mojoverse dog Gog have been wandering and playing around. The pair think they are running alongside a train but it turns out they crashed a film set.   

A vain, selfish director nicknamed “Hitch” because he compares himself to Alfred Hitchcock, is so impressed with Longshot’s physical abilities that he hires him as a stunt man. It’s only a comic book. Just go with it.

Our hero spends a week working on the set of the action film and a romance begins between him and stuntwoman Rita Wayword, nicknamed Ricochet Rita because of her own impressive agility. (Rita will prove very important to Longshot’s future.)

One day during a stunt involving jetpacks (as if they would use real jetpacks in movies) Longshot gets the stirring of some memories from wearing a flying jetpack during his life on Mojoworld. He was one of the enslaved beings on Mojoworld, used as soldiers in the wars waged by Mojo and his fellow Spineless Ones.

When not fighting wars, Longshot and others were forced to risk their lives in the gladiatorial games broadcast all over the Mojoverse. Mojo’s dual role as dictator and M.C. of the gladiatorial games made him like a cross between the Defenders and Guardians of the Galaxy villain Mon-Tee, the Grandmaster and Arcade.   

NOTE: If you’re new to all this, Mojo was the dictator of Mojoworld in the Mojoverse. The villain and his race had no vertebrae, hence their name. Their “look” was sort of like Jabba the Hutt but with humanoid faces.

Back to the story, when a friend of Longshot got killed during one of Mojo’s callous pieces of entertainment, our hero snapped and attacked the Spineless Ones and their creatures. He comes out of the memories, but his behavior and soft but leatherlike skin (and how about ONLY HAVING THREE FINGERS AND A THUMB, RITA? And two hearts?) freak out Rita, who leaves their hotel room.

Right after she leaves, five more humanoid and not-so-humanoid hunters from the Mojoverse attack Longshot. Gog, still growing, helps our hero fight them off. Gog’s thoughts show us that he wants to kill Longshot himself and is just biding his time until he’s big enough.

When Rita returns, her distrust of Gog makes him jump the gun and attack Longshot prematurely, and our main character drives him off, deeply hurt by the creature’s betrayal. The next day during another stunt on set, Longshot is distracted again by fragmented memories from Mojoworld.

This flashback shows Longshot as the center of a ritual by robed and hooded mystics casting a spell on the young man. They are granting him his “luck” powers and limiting them to work only when Longshot’s motives are pure.

Part of the spell goes “In purification of motives/ Luck forms/ Reality bends/ And the miraculous must follow.” To end the ritual they hold Longshot still while branding a star outline on his left eye, the same kind of outline on his costume’s right breast.

Longshot comes out of the flashback, realizes that his motive of making money as a stuntman is NOT “pure” and he has a near-fatal accident. The sleazy director Hitch leads a coverup and dumps our hero’s body in a nearby river.

LONGSHOT Vol 1 #3 (November 1985)

Title: Just Let Me Die

Villains: Spiral and Mojoverse creatures

Synopsis: We readers learn that Longshot’s powers also include quick healing, and he recovers from the seemingly fatal injuries he suffered last issue. He encounters Theo, a middle-aged man despairing over how life is going for himself and his family.

Theo wants to commit suicide, but Longshot tries to talk him into staying alive. Our hero misunderstands Theo’s complaint about Con Edison (the power company) having received a million dollars in industrial diamonds.

In a quasi-comedic bit, Longshot sets out to steal those diamonds from Con Ed and give them to Theo. The multi-armed Spiral and other Mojoverse creatures hunting Longshot spot him and surreptitiously follow him. During his break-in at Con Ed, the electrical equipment triggers another memory.

This memory involves Mojo and his fellow Spineless Ones genetically engineering Longshot and others like him (though Chris Claremont will retcon him into being a mutant member of Mojoworld’s races). We meet Arize, a genetic engineer who is secretly plotting an uprising against Mojo, to be led by the dictator’s own supersoldiers/ gladiators.   

The memories fade, and Longshot finds himself attacked by Spiral (at right) and her colleagues. The subsequent destructive battle damages so much equipment that Manhattan suffers a blackout. Comically enough, the story shows J. Jonah Jameson telling his staff that Spider-Man must be responsible.

Eventually, Spiral and her colleagues are able to use Con Ed’s industrial diamonds to open a portal and at last return to Mojoworld. The blackout causes looting and other issues for Manhattan.

Con Ed’s security cameras caught footage of Longshot during the break-in and he is in the news as a new supervillain.

LONGSHOT Vol 1 #4 (December 1985)

Title: Can’t Give It All Away

Villains: Mojo, Spiral, Gog

Synopsis: The next morning we see that Longshot has been trying to give away the handfuls of industrial diamonds he put in his pouch last issue. The news reports still blast him as a villain but giving away diamonds is adding a Robin Hood element to his legend.

She-Hulk, then a member of the Fantastic Four to replace the Thing, gets the hots for Longshot based on the footage of him at Con Ed. She believes the reports that he’s a villain, though, and leaves the Baxter Building in search of him. Peter Parker also sees the reports and becomes Spider-Man to look for our hero, too.

She-Hulk encounters him first and tries to capture him in Central Park. After battling for a while, Longshot manages to escape and lose her. Next, he encounters Spider-Man and they fight it out. In some nice bits Spidey insults Longshot about his mullet and the way his left eye glows sometimes.

As their battle drags on and on, Spider-Man recognizes that Longshot’s weird “luck” powers are just like Black Cat’s (see above). Longshot escapes Spider-Man, too.

While all that is going on, back on Mojoworld that dictator debriefs the returned Spiral and her team. They confirm that Longshot escaped to an entire planet inhabited by the type of humanoids that Mojo and his race use as slaves. They refer to humanoids as “ugly creatures” from their legends.

We readers learn from Mojo that Longshot was the leader of the recent uprising by the Spineless Ones’ soldiers/ gladiators. The rebellion was eventually defeated and the survivors, like Longshot, were mind-wiped. Our main character escaped during his mind-wipe, hence his fugitive status at the start of Longshot #1.

Mojo fears that Longshot may recruit a new army of humanoids from our planet if his memories return. He and Spiral teleport to Earth and try to make the frightened Ricochet Rita tell them where Longshot is.

A side story this issue has had Longshot interacting with a bunch of New York street kids who are humorous pastiches of the Little Rascals updated for the 1980s. (And yes, the “Darla” counterpart developed a crush on Longshot.) When he touches a gun they picked up, the psychometric readings he gets from the previous owner trigger even more of his memories.

He remembers even more about being a rebel leader and fighting in an uprising. His former “dog” Gog shows up, now fully grown and ready for battle. He attacks Longshot, revealing he (Gog) is the son of one of the Mojoverse hunters he fought at Con Ed.

LONGSHOT Vol 1 #5 (January 1986)

Title: Deadly Lies

Villains: Mojo, Spiral, Gog 

Synopsis: Longshot fights Gog in order to protect the children, whom he orders to flee. The fight soon goes Gog’s way due to our main character being so overwhelmed with conflicting emotions about the jumbled memories from his past.

Gog keeps fighting, while taunting Longshot with those memories that are still lost to him. The creature mocks him about a woman that our hero loves, and even children. Longshot is beaten, but Quark, a ram-headed humanoid from the Mojoverse, attacks Gog to save our title character.

Quark was an ally of Longshot during the rebellion and he snuck through the portal that brought our hero plus his hunters to Earth in the 1st issue. Gog defeats Quark, then notices Longshot has slipped away.

Back at Rita’s place, Mojo and Spiral take the stubborn young woman back to the Mojoverse, where the dictator’s mystic/ scientific powers experiment on her while probing for Longshot’s location.

Elsewhere, still reeling from everything that has happened to him since arriving on Earth, Longshot is overcome by even more memories returning. He recalls his first meeting with Arize, who revealed that he (Arize) is the creator of the Mojoverse. It was also he who evolved the spineless, wormy-type creatures of that dimension into the race that became Mojo and his ilk. (Maybe “the Boneless Ones” would have been better than the Spineless Ones.) Because Arize spoke English, he made that the language of the Mojoverse as well.

Arize was eventually removed from power by Mojo and his race, using the Mojoverse’s combination of science and magic. Longshot recalls the day that Arize chose him to lead a rebellion against Mojo and told him about the origin of the Mojoverse. 

Longshot now wants to return to his home dimension and take down Mojo. He seeks Rita’s help and returns to her most recent home back in upstate New York. Once there he meets Dr. Strange, who has sensed the vile entities from the Mojoverse hopping between dimensions so much of late. 

The destruction and shriveled plant life in Rita’s place tell Longshot that Mojo must have taken her. Dr. Strange can sense Mojo’s power and teams up with Longshot to save Rita and fight Mojo and Gog. The two heroes find Gog and attack him. 

Teamwork lets Dr. Strange and Longshot destroy Gog for good. Well, at least he hasn’t shown up again as of 2024. Quark arrives in the aftermath and tells Longshot that the two of them were among the troops granted “luck” powers by the hooded and robed figures working with Arize.

Dr. Strange senses that Mojo, Spiral and Rita have returned to Earth. He, Longshot and Quark prepare to confront them.

LONGSHOT Vol 1 #6 (February 1986)

Title: A Snake Coils

Villains: Mojo and Spiral

Synopsis: This double-sized final issue of the Longshot miniseries opened with Spiral and Mojo revealing that Rita Wayword’s mind collapsed under Mojo’s perverse questioning. Her mouth remains caught in a silent scream and she has been left sitting mindlessly in the ruins of her old home.

Mojo takes Spiral on a flying tour of the New York area, leaving plants and small animals dead in his wake and human beings reeling with nausea. He has decided to take over the Earth and make it just like Mojoworld, eventually filled with beings who worship him and power him through the attention they pay to his mass media spectacles and atrocities.

Meanwhile, Longshot has returned once again to Rita’s home in upstate New York. He finds her in her brain-blasted state, mouth agape but no sounds emerging. He touches her to get a psychometric reading of what happened to her. He sees the horrors that made her mind collapse and becomes even more hate-filled toward Mojo.

Dr. Strange and Quark interrupt his reverie to tell him that Mojo’s presence on Earth is causing increasingly worse conditions. There are now red rains falling and black lightning striking the ground. Longshot and Quark go after our villains while Strange teleports back to his Sanctum Sanctorum with Rita.

NOTE: Dr. Strange’s thoughts reveal to us that his mystic senses tell him that the forces of Destiny are involved in whatever is going on, and that Longshot and Mojo’s confrontation feels necessary to bring the chaos to an end – one way or the other.

The duo of Longshot and Quark come across the cliched scenario of multiple television sets in a store window all tuned into one newscast. This one is about the bizarrely designed “cathedral” to Mojo being constructed in the city by the villain’s new “worshippers”. The speedy construction is caused by Mojo’s dark techno-magic.

Spiral and Mojo show up and attack Longshot and Quark. We readers learn that Spiral has a romantic past with our hero, but it is not yet among the memories that have returned to him. As the battle goes on, Longshot nearly kills Mojo, who realizes his powers are greatly reduced on Earth because he has yet to gain enough of an audience/ worshippers here. He and Spiral teleport away.

Quark and Longshot call Dr. Strange at his Sanctum Sanctorum, where he and Wong are tending to Rita, who starts to come to at the mention of Longshot’s name. They inform Strange about Mojo’s seeming weakness and the unholy tower he is building. Stephen tells them to destroy the building before it can serve as a large enough “antenna” of sorts to attract worshippers to the villain and thereby increase his power.

Back at the upstate New York tower that Mojo’s enslaved “worshippers” are building for him, he promises Spiral to let her cut out Longshot’s hearts, but he calls dibs on getting to eat those hearts. Quark and Longshot launch a surprise attack, and their “luck” powers combined with their physical powers keep them alive against Mojo and Spiral.

In the nick of time, Dr. Strange and a fully conscious Rita arrive on the scene, and Doc adds his power to the forces opposing Mojo. Teamwork between Strange and Longshot eventually sends Mojo and Spiral through a mystic portal and back into the Mojoverse. 

Epilogue: In the aftermath, nature begins healing itself and the weird weather goes away. Mojo’s slaves are back to normal and struggling to come to grips with what just happened.

Longshot and Quark ready themselves to have Dr. Strange send them back to the Mojoverse so they can launch another revolt against Mojo and the Spineless Ones. Rita insists on going with them, despite Longshot’s warnings about how dangerous it will be.

Strange teleports the trio back, then ponders how he has confidence that Longshot, Quark and Rita will soon free Mojoworld from its dictator.

COMMENT: Because this 6-issue miniseries was meant to launch a full series for Longshot but failed, Dr. Strange’s last comment can be looked on the same way audiences still look at Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock’s remarks about the interesting adventures that Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln have ahead of them.

           As usual when I review these old stories I tried to clean up the frequent inconsistencies that are so typical of comic book writing, but in THIS tale there were too many to count. If any of the above seems full of plot holes blame the original writers.

          Regarding Longshot and this 6-part story, I was amazed at how such a slipshod, jumbled and often half-assed work spawned a figure who became popular in Marvel Comics to this very day. Off and on, anyway.

           After this adventure, Longshot went on to join the X-Men, where his long-running romance with Dazzler began. To justify having him on the team, Chris Claremont wrote that Longshot was a mutant, “but to a race far alien to Earth.” (This retcon was itself retconned later.)

           On the good side, I can see how the general outlines of Longshot’s saga developed a cult following. I was rooting for the story while reading it but ultimately gave up. Too scattershot, too much “and then” storytelling and poor artwork and WAY too many elements all mixed together.

          This Longshot miniseries felt like a comic book adaptation of a popular video game, with the story forced to be constructed around specific bits of canon that served their purpose for a 1980s game but were never intended as a long form story. It put me in mind of the stories that Marvel Comics did for licensed toy characters like The Micronauts or Rom: Spaceknight, except those stories were well written.

          But hey, Longshot’s luck made him an eventual sensation, helped immensely by his run with the X-Men, where his jumbled backstory wasn’t constantly front and center. His ridiculous mullet will forever date this character but I admit I’m glad that he survived long enough to figure into better storylines after assorted retcons and adjustments.

           In The X-Men alone, he was part of the team for the Fall of the Mutants storyline, Inferno, plus the return of the Brood, then the very first story set in Genosha, the first X-Men vs Fantastic Four miniseries and more.

          For my part, I feel that the best handling of Longshot would have been to use his years with the X-Men to resolve his dangling Mojoverse plot threads, reunite him and Spiral as a romantic couple and then have both of them join the Starjammers for adventures in outer space. And you’d have to dump that silly “his powers only work as long as his intentions are pure” b.s.

Years ago, Ryan Gosling should have been cast as Longshot in the Marvel movies.