The Daring Defenders

During the 1970s, early adventures of the Defenders ran as reprints in Rampage, a weekly series published with a large-size format in the United Kingdom.

Rampage #5 (November 15, 1977), for instance, reprinted Defenders #4 along with an early issue of Nova.

Modifications to the original Defenders story were limited to changing the words armor and favor to the British spellings of armour and favour. Footnotes from Defenders #4 were updated in Rampage #5 to cite U.K. reprints rather than the U.S. comics where the stories first appeared. The original interior art reprinted in black-and-white.

Rampage covers ran in full-color with new text that regularly billed the non-team as the daring Defenders, whereas promotional material in the United States described the heroes as the dynamic Defenders. Although dynamic might describe the eclectic nature of the team, daring certainly sounds more heroic.

Defenders of the Deep

The latest run of the Avengers introduced a new team of underwater adversaries called the Defenders of the Deep. Sub-Mariner formed the super-group to enforce his longstanding demand that humans steer clear of the ocean (Avengers #9-10).

Most members of the Defenders of the Deep were established criminals, including Tiger Shark, Orka, King Crab, Manowar, Echidna, the Piranhas, and Bloodtide (a.k.a. Water Witch). The exception was the heroic Andromeda, whose Atlantean partisanship fueled her involvement with the group.

Aside from a fondness for the word Defenders, this configuration of denizens from the deep had no substantive ties to the original non-team of Defenders that Sub-Mariner helped found or the New Defenders that Andromeda later joined.

This image of the Defenders of the Deep comes from Avengers #9 (December 2018).