Marvel Short #38 – The Counter-Invaders (part 1)

So, I’ve mentioned before that I set out to try and weave some elements from real life into these toy comic stories. It takes more to save the world than just punching bad guys, even though that’s what superheroes tend to be best at. Sometimes, however, punching a bad guy is exactly what the world needs.

I’m going to refer here to another of my favorite episodes of the X-Men animated series, “Red Dawn,” where a group of ex-Soviet generals reawaken the uncontrollable super-soldier Omega Red, in a bid to forcibly reunite the USSR, alongside their pawn, Darkstar, Native Russian mutant Colossus comes to America to enlist the X-Men’s help to save his people, but only returns home with Jubilee. Over the course of the episode, Wolverine, Rogue, Storm, and Gambit finally join the fight, and at the last possible second, after Darkstar chooses to join the side of righteousness, Omega Red is stopped.

I’ve been thinking about that episode a lot, ever since I first heard new of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and though it’s not much, I wanted to take a moment in my comic to offer some support* to the people whose lives are under threat because they want to continue to live, in their own country. I only ever learned about Darkstar from the X-Men cartoon; I love her costume, and I’m glad there’s a toy of her, so I was able to bring her in to kick off this little series from the “front lines.”

Given that Marvel Comics really got its feet under it in the early 1960’s, when the Cold War raging away, it makes sense that there are a lot of Russian super-characters, heroes and villains alike, in the personnel files. I have a tough time imagining any of these characters – save the aforementioned Omega Red – would be on Putin’s side in this conflict.

*I want to be clear here that I don’t want to trivialize the very real suffering that people living in war zones are undergoing, and their friends and family, and, of course, the people fighting to protect them. I just feel that, in my little world, superheroes could and would get themselves to the front lines, and stand between innocent people trying to live their lives, and the virulent machinery of war that’s trying to grind them up.