Marvel Premiere #43 featuring Paladin (1978)

   One day soon I’ll put together a timeline of my comics reading history through the 70s and early 80s. Most of it was black and white Marvel reprints interspersed with some altogether more anarchic British weeklies.  It was all just good entertaining fun at the time but on reflection a lot of it has proven to have been incredibly formative.  And as such, it’s interesting to occasionally dip back into the wellspring and taste the waters again.

   One that I’ve bought again recently, although it’s been on my mind to do so for a very long time now, is Marvel Premiere #43 featuring Paladin.  I only ever picked up a handful of the American size, all colour Marvel comics back in the late 70s because they were generally more expensive than the UK reprints and just not as readily available. If there were specialist comic book shops around back then, none of them were near me.  However, there was one newsagent in a local town that kept a well-stocked spinner and on an occasional Saturday morning shopping trip, I would treat myself to something new and lurid.

   The real highlights from that Newsagent’s comic rack were The Torpedo, Jack of Hearts, and Deathlok the Demolisher. After that it was Paladin.  Paladin - “Super Soldier of Fortune” - was easily the more obscure of those and who, to the best of my knowledge, has never had his name in the title of another comic book since.  I didn’t encounter him again until a guest appearance in a Punisher Graphic novel well over a decade later, and he wasn’t handled the best as I recall but that Premiere meeting stayed with me.

   Rereading that comic again a couple of times in the last week, was fascinating and I can fully understand why it left an impression on me then.

   

   On the surface it’s your traditional struggle between a hero and a villain with an attractive woman’s life as the stakes.  It’s also pretty much one long fights scene over two consecutive nights.  The dialogue is a touch verbose in style, which was very much the house style back then, but beyond all of that, there is actually something a little more unusual about the book.

   For starters if he has any special powers they aren’t really shown off to any great degree in this story and in actual fact, he seems to get rescued by the woman he’s trying to keep alive, almost as many times as he saves her.  And then when he thinks he has failed to do that, he goes out for blind revenge on her supposed killer, and still keeps getting his arsed kicked until some good luck and couple of well-placed bullets draw the battle to a premature close. Which isn’t to say Paladin is rubbish at what he does but he’s certainly flawed and emotional and he’s up against someone with far more power and crazies than himself.

   Writer Don McGregor gives the conversational exchanges between the three main characters a heavy air of fatalism.  If there is any peace to be had at the end of it all, it feels like it will be short lived.  All three of them seem self-destructive and the story’s happy ending, if that is what it is, feels like just a snatched moment that wont last beyond the rest of the night.

   On top of that, there is a real neon noir feel to the art with a moody pallet of colours that never lets you forget that its nighttime in the city.  And I’m not sure if its me buying into it more than I should but I could really hear the bullets and broken glass and the sound of the wind whipping around the top of the skyscrapers.

   Now I wouldn’t necessarily have been able to pull all of that apart and name it back when I was ten years old, but I would have felt it and recognised it as a far more potent brew than my previous regular visits to the Marvel universe via black and white reprints of The Hulk and Spider-Man.

   I don’t think Paladin is one of Marvels finest creations or that comic fans were robbed by him never getting his own book.  I’m not even sure that everything that is great about that one issue could have even been sustained over a longer ongoing run. But it spoke to me and illustrated my leanings to the darker side of Marvel Comics.  I’m not sure I ever fully bought into the heroic hero, the one with the great powers that does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do but I’ve a lot of time for morally ambiguous and flawed characters that stumble and fall towards their own versions of redemption and truth.  I learned that from reading comics like this and then I went looking for it in films, TV and books.

   Marvel Premiere #43 feels like its even more important a comic to me than I first thought, and I won’t be letting it go quite so easily again.  One for the reliquary, I think.

Steve