Waxing Poetic

The opening page of New Defenders #150 included the first stanza of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "To the Moon." Written in the early nineteenth century, the short poem set the tone for the heroes' outer space encounter with the Star-Thief. The full poem appears below.

To the Moon Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth,— And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object like its constancy? Thou chosen sister of the Spirit, That gazes on thee till in thee it pities …

The illustration above comes from New Defenders $150 (Dec. 1985).

Warren's Wardrobe

Warren Worthington III redesigned his costume a handful of times during his heroic career as Angel. Of all his costumes, my favorite was the red-and-white costume with a halo insignia that he began wearing in Champions #8. That costume replaced the open-chested, yellow-and-red costume introduced in Champions #1. The red-and-white costume was in fact a variation of a blue-and-white costume that he began wearing as one of the original X-Men (replacing a costume with suspenders first seen in X-Men #39). After the Champions disbanded, Warren sometimes returned to the blue-and-white costume, but he stayed with the red-and-white version throughout his time with the New Defenders. Because of his wings, Warren was identifiable as the Angel no matter which uniform he wore.

These panesl come from Champions $8 (Oct. 1976).

Uncollected

The New Defenders almost encountered the Collector in Marvel Team-Up Annual #7 (1984). In that issue, the supervillain wanted to expand his collection of extraterrestrials—and he found several prospects residing on Earth. Under consideration were Warlock of the New Mutants and Cloud of the New Defenders. The Collector passed them both up, however, turning his attention instead to Spider-Man (sporting a symbiotic alien costume from Secret Wars) and Marrina of Alpha Flight (and from the Plodex homeworld). Though easy to overlook, the panel featuring Cloud provided an important piece of foreshadowing for the New Defenders, as Cloud's extraterrestrial origin story had yet to be revealed.

Lawful Evil: Sentinels

Programmed to regard all mutants as a threat to humanity, the Sentinels became persistent adversaries of the heroic X-Men. The giant robots operated largely in tandem while carrying out their objective to eliminate mutantkind. By following their own logic, the Sentinels would classify as Lawful Evil within the alignment system from Dungeons & Dragons.

Lawful Good	Neutral Good	Chaotic Good
Lawful Neutral	True Neutral	Chaotic Neutral
Lawful Evil	Neutral Evil	Chaotic Evil

Giant-Size X-Men #2 (1975) reprinted the three-part story from X-Men #57-59, which pitted the Sentinels against "the most unusal fighting team of all time!"