FOR PART 1 OF BALLADEER’S BLOG’S EXAMINATION OF MARVEL’S SUPERHEROINE MANTIS CLICK HERE
THE DEFENDERS Volume 1, Number 9 (October 1973) Divide and Conquer
This worldwide clash between the Avengers and the Defenders was a crossover story covered in multiple issues of each of their separate comic books. Mantis gets to shine once again as the mystery surrounding her deepens.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
The Silver Surfer, fresh from his battle with the Vision and the Scarlet Witch in French Polynesia, arrives back at Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum. He carries with him the fragment of the Evil Eye of Avalon that he outfought the two Avengers for.
The Surfer tells the good Doctor about how the Avengers seem to be opposing the Defenders’ plan to reassemble the Evil Eye in order to free the superhero called the Black Knight from the spell that keeps him trapped in stone form.
Neither the Avengers nor the Defenders are aware that they are being manipulated by Dormammu – an enemy of Dr Strange and the Defenders – and by Loki, an enemy of Thor and the Avengers. The Avengers think they are preventing the Defenders from enacting revenge against the world over their various grievances, a revenge that the reassembled Evil Eye of Avalon will make unstoppable.
For their part, the Defenders think that collecting the six scattered fragments of the Evil Eye will restore the Black Knight to normal. Dormammu tricked them into thinking that, but actually that Lord of the Dark Dimension wants the Eye so that he can destroy both superteams AND our universe. Continue reading
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