Finally this week, The Last Defenders #1.  It's a Defenders miniseries.  Kind of.  A bit.

Co-written by Joe Casey and Keith Giffen, with Jim Muniz providing art from Giffen's breakdowns, this is a curious comic.  I'm not entirely sure quite what it's trying to be, although it seems pretty clear about what it isn't.  Ultimately, it's my faith in the writers that makes me assume they must be heading somewhere with this, rather than the story itself, which is mildly irrational, and littered with subplots.

As a concept, the Defenders have never really worked.  The original premise was little more than "Here's some solo heroes who aren't in the Avengers - let's put them in a team."  Unfortunately, there was no convincing reason for the Hulk, Dr Strange, the Sub-Mariner and the Silver Surfer to be on a team, and writers generally gave up trying pretty quickly.  Instead, Defenders became a more or less random collection of C-list heroes, on which idiosyncratic creators such as Steve Gerber were sometimes allowed free reign.  But the distinctiveness of those stories was due to Gerber, not to any particular strength of the "yet another generic team" concept.

What we seem to have here is a Defenders series wrestling with the fundamentally shaky nature of the premise.  Having belatedly signed up for the Initiative, Nighthawk is convinced that the Defenders must surely have something to offer.  After all, the Initiative is putting together a superteam for each state.  Surely, with 50 teams to recruit, there's got to be room for a Defenders reunion?

But that's not how Tony Stark sees it.  The Defenders?  Not a bad name.  But otherwise, basically rubbish.  And so it is that poor, beleaguered Nighthawk finds himself a new "Defenders" team consisting of Colossus, She-Hulk and the Blazing Skull - none of whom have got the slightest connection with the Defenders.  Together, they defend... New Jersey.  This isn't quite what Nighthawk had in mind, but he's going to make the best of it.

This is a weird premise for a book.  Casey and Giffen seem to have gone out of their way to create a Defenders team whose defining feature is that they aren't the Defenders.  It's almost as though they're going to attempt to define what the Defenders were really about by saddling Nighthawk with this travesty.  He's the only character to provide any real link with the original team, and even he was always a bit of a well-meaning wannabe.

Not that the characters are played for laughs, particularly.  But they're not the Defenders.  They're an essentially competent random team-up.  The issue even ends with Yandroth (an obscure Defenders villain) telling us how important the original Defenders are.

Where on earth do you go with that, as a story?  Common sense says that this is heading towards a story about how the Defenders concept has some value after all, and I can't imagine how they're going to sell me on that idea.  If that's not the direction, I can't begin to imagine where this is going.

But there's enough in here to give me faith that Casey and Giffen know what they're doing, and in a weird, roundabout way, they really do have a good reason for calling this a Defenders series - even though the Defenders aren't in it.  An oddity, but an intriguing one.

Rating: B+

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