This weekend’s light-hearted, escapist superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog finishes examining Marvel Premiere.
MARVEL PREMIERE Vol 1 #41 (Apr 1978)
Title: The Dying Sun
Villains: Jason and the Six
Synopsis: In a timeline outside of Marvel’s main continuity, Earth of the year 3000 A.D. is facing the imminent supernova of our Sun. The news has been kept from the public at large by the Six, a half-dozen power-mad people each of which rules one of the occupied continents. Leading the Six is Jason (no last name ever given).
Jason and the Six have secretly financed a massive spaceship called the Seeker 3000 and selected an elite crew of hundreds to pilot the vessel, themselves and cellular material of thousands of the Six’s friends and family members in order to flee the solar system before the sun goes nova.
They will all seek out a new planet to inhabit, with the thousands of cell samples being used to clone a sufficient genetic pool to start a new civilization. We are told that no previous attempt at a warp-speed vessel has ever worked, so Seeker 3000 is humanity’s last hope.
The crew members we meet in this debut story – 1. Captain Jordan Shaw (right), a decent man appalled at the way the Six have chosen to play God with who gets to escape and who gets left behind to die. He cooperates just so he and his wife can survive, so he bitterly knows he is no better than the oligarchs in the end.
2. Lt. Valida Payton, a black female solar engineer, physicist and Shaw’s second in command. 3. Ensign Ben Payton, Valida’s brother, who is a biologist, terraformist and cloning engineer. 4. Dr. John Running Bear, a Native American, physician, psychiatrist and behavioral scientist.
And 5. Phaedra (left), a mutant with telekinetic and telepathic abilities. She and Earth’s hundreds of other mutants live in prison camps at the Six’s command while their abilities are probed. They are all forced to wear facial tattoos to prevent them hiding their mutant status.
NOTE: Yes, a few years before Chris Claremont & John Byrne nabbed these exact designs for facial tattoos on an imprisoned mutant race in Days of Future Past, this story used them first. Continue reading
CONAN THE BARBARIAN Vol 1 #52 (Jul 1975) 
Conan finds the Ring of the Black Shadow, thus animating a huge statue of the Scorpion God which guards the ring to keep it out of human hands. Our hero fights the statue and renders it inert again with a sword through its “brain.”
MR. A 
MARVEL PREMIERE Vol 1 #31 (Aug 1976) 
Superstitious people in Liberty, NM get covert glimpses of the creature and decide to raid the Pace ranch to destroy Woodgod and any other such “monsters” being created there. David and Ellen are shot to death in the attack but our main character is super-strong and invulnerable, so he survives being shot multiple times.
TEEN TITANS Vol 1 #44 (Nov 1976) 
FLASH COMICS Vol 1 #1 (Jan 1940) 
Jay’s love interest Joan Williams asks him to find her father, who has been abducted by enemy spies called the Faultless Four and led by the French Sir Satan. The Frenchman and his British, Russian and Slavic colleagues want her retired major father to reveal the secrets of America’s new Atomic Bombarder.
This weekend’s belated superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog looks at this Iron Fist adventure serialized in Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. It was penned by Chris Claremont and though it features his X-Men foes the Demons of the N’Garai and a woman called the Firebird whose schtick resembles his later retcons to the Phoenix Force, the story ultimately sucks and is an incoherent mess. 
DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU Vol 1 #19 (Dec 1975)
Iron Fist attacks the pair, joined by Colleen, who is swiftly defeated. Our hero continues fighting the Messengers and when he uses the power of the Iron Fist to finish them off, that somehow causes him and Jade to be transported from Earth to Feng-Tu. They are in the throne room of Dhasha Khan (right), who affirms that he is the ruler of this afterlife and states that he plans to strip Jade of her soul and have it damned forever.
MARVEL PREMIERE Vol 1 #1 (Apr 1972) 
The High Evolutionary studied his creation from an orbiting headquarters, kept company by 
CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS Vol 1 #6 (Sep 1941) 
Story 3: Captain America Meets the Hangman 
SPIDER-MAN Vol 1 #50 (Jul 1967) 
Over the next few weeks, the crime rate in New York City skyrockets with no Spider-Man getting in the way of villainy and only Daredevil fighting street-level wrongdoing. Our hero’s absence is noted in criminal circles, inspiring the Kingpin to at last operate openly. 
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