Weird Team Wednesday with Sal Buscema !

After covering most of the series Sal Buscema worked on about which I haven't written something before SAL BUSCEMA MONTH continues with Marvel Comics famous non team, THE DEFENDERS which I have already covered in two posts, three if you count my 2016 post on POWER MAN & IRON FIST 79 in which Luke Cage and Daniel Rand meet Doctor Who ( well, kind of ) where I got into the history of the team to explain who are really key members of the team instead of who appeared on the tv show - which is mainly based on one unfortunate issue where half of the Marvel universe that is not associated to a team becomes a member of the Defenders for like five minutes. But then that's Hollywood for you.

Coming to my previous proper Defenders posts, the first one from 2022 was a tribute post in honour of Steve Englehart 75th birthday and since he wrote the first 11 issues of the series all the art in that post was by Sal Buscema. Steve Englehart may have been THE most influential writer of super hero comicbooks in the 70s with groundbreaking storylines for DEFENDERS, AVENGERS, DOCTOR STRANGE, CAPTAIN AMERICA ( about we will talk more in an upcoming SAL BUSCEMA MONTH post ) and BATMAN plus co - creating SHANG CHI, MASTER OF KUNG FU with Jim Starlin and participating in the first unofficial crossover between Marvel Comics and DC Comics with Len Wein and Gerry Conway that took place in AMAZING ADVENTURES 16, JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA 103 and lastly THOR 207.

By the time I wrote my second proper Defenders post - back in 2023 - my previous picture archive had already been destroyed so all the material I had prepared after writing the first one was gone and I had to start from scratch. So that post included the best original art pages available at that time with an emphasis on the work of master inker Joe Sinnott - for whom I have done a number of posts - and which incorporated pages of different periods of the book including some illustrated by Sal Buscema.

So I would like to say that we are continuing where we left things off but the truth is we are going all the way back in this one to DEFENDERS issue 1 and onwards. Which means we are treating familiar ground but I have done my best to make sure I don't post anything that I have used before.

One last thing, usually I prefer to use scans from the actual comicbooks because of the more subdued colour palette but the quality of those scans were so low that I had to resort to some scans from the MARVEL MASTERWORK editions. And with that said let's get to the good stuff which is a lot of pages by Sal Buscema from issues 1 - 16 of DEFENDERS.

the best defence is a good defence