On 2010's The Twelve: Spearhead #1

In putting together the cast for his 12-issue limited series The Twelve, writer J. Michael Straczynski seems to have scoured the pages of Timely's old Golden Age comics for any characters that Roy Thomas might have missed a few decades previous. I imagine that this is how he came up with a dozen characters so obscure—some having only a single appearance, or two or three before being forgotten—that they made The Blue Diamond look like Wolverine by comparison.

The premise for the series was that in the last days of World War II, twelve minor superheroes—The Blue Blade, Captain Wonder, Dynamic Man, The Fiery Mask,The  Laughing Mask, Mastermind Excello, Mister E, The Phantom Reporter, Rockman, The Witness, the robot Electro and a previous Black Widow—were ambushed and gassed by the Nazis, and then put in suspended animation. The Nazis hoped to be able to study them later, after the war.

Given that the Nazis lost, of course, they never got the chance to do so, and so the heroes remained cryogenically frozen until 2008, the year the series launched. In that respect, they were a little like Captain America only, you know, times twelve. And are, like most Golden Age superheroes that never caught on, a bunch of real weirdos.

The twelve are all housed together as they adjust to the new, greatly changed world, which sounds an awful lot like the set-up for a reality show, but one of them is murdered, presumably by another of them, and the series was essentially a murder mystery of sorts.

Straczynski was partnered on the book with the great Chris Weston, and so it of course looked great. It certainly seemed to have some potential and was catnip to a fan of weird Golden Age heroes like me (Of course, the #0 issue and the #1/2 issue, which featured reprints of some of the characters original adventures, were actually my favorite part of the endeavor).

I wonder if, today, the series is best known for its incredible delay though.

As I said, the book launched in 2008 and kept to a monthly-ish schedule for the first eight issues. And then Straczynski apparently got busy with his day job (a Hollywood screenwriter), and there was an long delay of about three and a half years between issues #8 and #9. That's...not ideal, of course, especially for what was essentially a graphic novel published serially, but I suppose they at least finished it, unlike some other high-profile comics from Hollywood types-turned-comics writers, like, say, Kevin Smith's abandoned 2003 Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target or Jon Favreau's half-finished  2008 Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas. 

During that extremely long gap between #8 and #9, Marvel published a 36-page one-shot both written and drawn by Weston in 2010. It was entitled The Twelve: Spearhead and was set during the war in Germany, presumably shortly before the heroes were put in suspended animation. 

Pretty much completely divorced from the plot of Straczynski's The Twelve, Spearhead's main connective tissue is Weston's strong and realistic art, which gives all the characters very distinct, unique looks, so that even characters like The Phantom Reporter and Mister E, who dress almost identically, look like entirely different people. I mean, it's a pretty basic thing, but it's not something the majority of modern American comic artists might even bother with. (One of the great strengths of The Twelve was that its cast seemed to consist mostly of guys with faces like character actors, rather than all looking like matinee idols.)

That, and Weston of course honors the various personalities of the misfit heroes Straczynski had earlier established, some of which are quite...well, colorful, I guess.

Our point-of-view character is The Phantom Reporter, whose day job is, of course, that of a reporter, although he's taken to donning a mask and cape over his suit and fighting crime. (When Dynamic Man asks him what his powers are in the one-shot, he replies, "I'm more your 'masked avenger' type.")

He's on the frontline covering the story of the superheroes in the war, or, as U.S. army officers put it, helping with propaganda (Interestingly, when various soldier characters talk to him, they often refer to him by the initials of "P.R.", which, of course, also stands of "public relations", which is what he's doing for the military, really...although I don't know if that term was in popular usage back in the 1940s).

We follow him around and he essentially runs into other members of the cast of The Twelve or, in the case of The Black Widow, just hears a brief, scary story about her (And this Black Widow is scary; she's a super-powered servant of Satan; during her brief appearance here, she's shown standing in a room full of dead Nazi soldiers, some of whom are disemboweled, others of whom are missing their heads or limbs, and wiping blood off he hands on a Nazi flag. "This whole country offered its soul up to my master..." she says, "I'm here to collect.").

So in the opening, he watches with some soldiers from the tree line as the super-powered Dynamic Man strides up to a Nazi fortification, bullets bouncing off of him, and kills them all. He's on page just long enough to let us know that a) he's super-powered and b) he's a total asshole.

Phantom Reporter will later be saved by killer robot Electro, a large, remote-controlled robot with the face of his inventor appearing on a screen where his head should be (He's the big guy in the back of the cover up there), he will meet the psychic Mastermind Excello, who is using his mind-powers to gather intel for the U.S. forces, he will take in a USO show hosted by The Blue Blade, and compare notes with Mister E and The Witness, the latter of whom talks about the horrors he saw in a liberated concentration camp.

Some characters do barely more than cameo. For example, The Flaming Mask is shown standing behind some captured troops in one panel, while Captain Wonder is shown helping a damaged plane land, and P.R. comments on his bare legs. ("Who is that anyway?" Mister E asks. "Captain America?" P.R. responds, "Captain America can't fly. And has the decency to put some pants on.")

So too do plenty of other Marvel Golden Agers, which helps contextualize the characters of The Twelve within a sort of retconned Golden Age of the Marvel Universe (Or should that be Timely Universe?). And so we see The Destroyer and Blazing Skull milling around at the side of one panel, or another featuring Red Raven, Union Jack and...actually, I don't even know who these two lifting that gun up are, although I've seen the one on the left before. (Is the guy on the right The Black Marvel, maybe...?) 

Eventually, The Phantom Reporter learns of a big superhero-led operation, and he wants in on it. This is led by Captain America himself and will feature Rockman, Mastermind Excello and some of the more prominent Golden Agers, like The Human Torch, Miss America and The Whizzer (at this point, still rocking that weird-ass bird head on the front of his cowl). 

The mission will involve a fight with The Red Skull, mostly fought by Captain America and conducted off-panel, and an attempt to recover The Spear of Destiny, which is also  here referred to as "The Lance of St. Maruice", and which is ultimately put in "safe hands" (The panel accompanying those words shows a U.S. military officer gripping the spear, which is glowing and it looks rather ominous, but I don't know if anything bad ever comes of it...as far as I've been able to follow Marvel's Spear, it will "next" show up in 1994's Wolverine: Evilution and then the 2010-2011 Invaders Now!).

The issue ends with a practically poster-ready dramatic double-page splash showing all twelve of the heroes from The Twelve  rushing towards their fate.

So it is essentially a bit of a tour of Marvel's Golden Age heroes at war, serving as an introduction, or, given the delays in The Twelve series, a reintroduction, or, perhaps even a reminder, of the cast of the series. 

Weston also seems to take some pains to point out to what degree war is hell, with Nazis quite violently killed (in addition to that panel of The Black Widow, when Electro makes the scene, it tears an enemy soldier in half), even ones that Weston bothers to briefly humanize, like those that Dynamic Man lays into in the opening pages (Later, The Laughing Mask will execute some Nazi officers, shooting them in the backs of their heads as they kneel before him). 

It's not just the Nazis who die violently and graphically either, though; at one point, P.R. is in a jeep driven by a soldier with whom he has some exchanges, and, when the Nazi's ambush them, he takes a bullet to the head, half of his head seeming to explode. 

And, of course, there's the passage where The Witness describes what he saw, Weston confronting us with the disturbing images of the Holocaust. 

Weston also repeatedly contrasts the super-people's actions with those of the regular, mortal, flesh and blood soldiers who do most of the actual fighting and dying. It's their war Weston through The Phantom Reporter repeatedly stresses. As for the people in the costumes? They just "make it look good."

I know this issue is collected in The Twelve: The Complete Series, which Marvel published in hardcover in 2013 and trade paperback in 2014 (I'm kind of tempted now to revisit the main series via one of the collections, but my local library system doesn't have seem to have a copy available, and I'm not sure if I want to buy one...if I knew whether or not the #0 and #1/2 issues were collected alongside the rest of the series, I might be moved to do so.)

Regardless, Spearhead reads quite well on its own, and delivers on the most immediate pleasures of the series—the weird, obscure Golden Age characters and Weston's art—that are the strongest selling points of The Twelve series. So, should you see it in a back issue bin, you may like to pick it up; it's also available via Amazon/Comixology.