The Defender: William Shatner

In New Defenders #128 (Feb. 1984), Beast lamented that his VHS tapes of the 79 episodes of Star Trek were ruined. I wonder if Beast was also a fan of The Defenders television series that ran 1961-1965 on CBS. Before William Shatner became Captain Kirk, the actor appeared five times on the courtroom drama. Far from being typecast, Shatner played a different role in each of those Defenders episodes:

"Killer Instinct" "The Invisible Badge" "The Cruel Hook" "The Uncivil War" "Whipping Boy"

Shatner previously starred as a young defense attorney in a television play titled The Defender, which aired in two parts on CBS in 1957.

The Second Cosmos

Defenders #4 (Vol. 6) announced that the final installment of that five-part series would list the Marvel heroes and villains who were the basis for the archetypal characters in the Fourth Cosmos. Instead, those answers appeared at the end of Defenders: Beyond #2, reinforcing how intersected the two limited series happened to be.

Often reading like a travelogue, Beyond #2 brought the latest group of Defenders to the Second Cosmos, described as a multiverse of possibility and infinite instability. In a fitting touch of continuity, the issue brought back the Omega Council and Concordance Engines, credited in Defenders #11 (Vol. 4) for the impressive number of improbable events that happen on Earth.

This page comes from Defenders: Beyond #2 (Oct. 2022).