Welcome to the 902nd installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, our third legend is about how Moondragon's origin in the pages of Daredevil were written and drawn for an issue of Iron Man.
I've spilled a lot of digital ink on the topic of Marvel's second generation of comic book writers, the ones who came of age reading comic books. Roy Thomas was obviously at the forefront of this generation (although Steve Skeates was actually the first second generation Marvel writer), but a few years after Thomas became a sort of dynamic duo at Marvel with Stan Lee (with the two scripting nearly every Marvel comic book), Thomas was now the "grizzled veteran" in his early 30s hiring a bunch of new writers in their early 20s (or even very late teens!). As a result, these new writers ended up really bonding with each other, resulting in a strange sort of synchronicity between the various titles. Since they all hung out together (and, in many cases, got high together), plotting sessions were an extremely informal sort of thing. Roy Thomas would later note that he never even considered the idea of trying to take a plotting credit for a book he wasn't writing, since that's just how it was done, everyone helped each other out with plot ideas.
As a result, there would often be some strange mixes between titles, where they would be connected because the creators involved were created, and not so much because the titles actually made sense to be connected. That is what led to the bizarre issue of Steve Gerber's Daredevil that had the origin of Moondragon by Jim Starlin to set up a then-impending Captain Marvel storyline by Starlin, and it all involved pages Starlin did for Iron Man before he and Gerber were fired off of the title.
What were the strange origins of Moondragon?
Moondragon debuted as a bad guy in Iron Man #54 (by Mike Friedrich and George Tuska from a Bill Everett plot idea). And how do we know that she is a bad guy? Her name was freakin' MADAME MacEVIL when she debuted in the issue!
She really wanted to experiment on Namor the Submariner (which makes sense, since the plot idea came from Bil Everett, the creator of Namor, who sadly had passed away around the time this issue came out. I wouldn't be surprised if this plot idea by Everett was originally intended for an issue of The Sub-Mariner)...
Madame MacEvil manipulated Iron Man into defeating Namor so that she could study Namor. It did not work out...
That's a strange debut for the character, but her comic book journey took a WHOLE other detour after this issue.
How did Moondragon end up in Daredevil with unused Iron Man pages by Starlin?
As I've noted in an old legend, Jim Starlin and Friedrich took over Iron Man with the next issue, Iron Man #55, where Starlin introduced a few characters that he had come up with during some college classes he had taken in psychology...
While it was nothing OFFICIALLY more than a fill-in issue at the time, when it went well enough, Starlin started on the next issue, with Steve Gerber now as the co-plotter/scripter, with the idea that they were now just the regular Iron Man creative team, and thus, Starlin was going to continue to work in his Thanos-inspired characters into his Iron Man run.
However, as I noted just recently (the legend that I wrote because I needed to explain the setup for THIS legend), Starlin and Gerber's next issue was so hated by Stan Lee that he fired them from the book as soon as he saw it. However, as you might imagine, that reaction from Stan Lee came late enough in the game that Starlin had already started working on the NEXT issue of their Iron Man run, and when Lee canceled their run, Starlin had these extra pages left over. They were tied to his continuing plot involving Thanos.
Well, Gerber ended up taking over Daredevil, and so Gerber, almost certainly with input from Starlin, then brought Madame MacEvil back and revealed that she WASN'T actually a villain! It was all a big misunderstanding. This was originally going to occur in Iron Man #57, but instead, in the middle of Daredevil #105 (by Gerber, Don Heck and Don Perlin), Daredevil suddenly meets Madame MacEvil, who explains that is not her actual name and vilainy is not her deal..
We then cut in the issue to the pages drawn by Starlin, where he gives her the name, Moondragon, and explains away her seemingly villainous ways.
She had been raised as an orphan on Titan, and she knew how evil Thanos was, and after he did some more evil stuff, she headed to Earth to study humans to find a way to fight Thanos, and since she feared that Thanos had control of humanity already, that's why she needed to experiment on Namor, she needed to find a way to get some help fighting Thanos.
Okay, so after a few issues of appearing in Daredevil, she then moved over to Starlin's Captain Marvel run with issue #31...
The letters column of Captain Marvel #29 explained the situation (how the Statrlin Iron Man pages ended up in Daredevil #105).
This was a really fascinating examination of the close working relationship of Marvel's creators in the early 1970s. It resulted in a fascinating sense of the Marvel Universe really being a shared situation (this sort of thing was big in the mid-1980s, as well, when Chris Claremont, Walter Simonson, Louise Simonson, Roger Stern and John Byrne were all so close to each other that their stories overlapped a LOT).
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That's it for Comic Book Legends Revealed #902! See you next installment! Be sure to check out my Entertainment Legends Revealed for more urban legends about the world of film and TV.
Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com.