Avengers #83. Come on in...

Marvel Treasury Editions, they were a grandiose form of madness. Like Goliath, too big to be practical but too big to be ignored. Unlike Goliath, offering us the chance to see the work of our favourite artists reproduced full size.

I only ever had four Treasury Editions, and one of them was #7, The Avengers, which in retrospect had a theme of debuts, featuring as it did, the Avengers debuts of the Panther, the Vision and Yellowjacket.

It featured one other debut.

The first ever appearance of the Valkyrie. But not the Valkyrie we all came to know and love. For this Valkyrie was a villainess with nothing on her mind but treachery.

Not that we know this when we first meet her. Summoned to the Avengers' Mansion by a mystery telegram; the Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Black Widow and Medusa meet their summoner, a rampant feminist egomaniac powerhouse who after stoking up their resentment against the male Avengers, leads them on a mission to defeat said group in order to show them that anything they can do, their female counterparts can do better.

The male Avengers are in Vermont for a Halloween parade which includes a Dr T W Erwin and his Parallel Time device.

They're not the only ones, because the Masters of Evil have turned up and are after that device.

Engaging the villains in battle, the Avengers soon find themselves in trouble but are saved when the newly labelled Lady Liberators show up and, despite their relatively puny powers (hair, a wasp's sting, looking good in a leather) easily flatten the Masters of Evil.

That's when the Valkyrie makes her move, knocks out the Avengers and reveals she is in fact the Enchantress out to steal the Dr's device so she can use it to return to Asgard and gain her revenge on such vexing men as Thor, Odin and the Executioner. Happily her magic's no match for the Scarlet Witch's hex power and she's blasted to atoms, leaving Goliath to declare that he hopes it's taught those pesky women the foolishness of that Women's Lib nonsense.

This was always my favourite tale in that Treasury edition. Partly that was because it all looked rather lovely, drawn by John Buscema and inked by Tom Palmer. These days I'm not that keen on Tom Palmer's inking over Buscema, feeling its heavy use of ink smothers Buscema's pencil work a little too much but there's no denying Palmer 's a great inker, so it was always going to look good. I also liked the Halloween parade setting, the return of the Masters of Evil and the cameo appearance by Roy and Jean Thomas as guests at a Halloween party.

But however much we might all love to meet Roy and Jean, and re-meet the Masters of Evil, not to mention seeing the Masters of Evil and the Avengers both get whupped by a bunch of girls, the focus is all on one character - the Valkyrie. Even in this one appearance and as a bad guy you can't escape the fact that the Valkyrie's a more interesting character than the Enchantress, meaning it's actually a let-down when the big reveal's made. They've just replaced a cool new villainess with a not so cool old one.

In the end, this is the one real flaw of the tale, that the Valkyrie's potential as a baddie's totally wasted. The woman can throw cars around with her bare hands and has flying horses but our glimpse of her in action is limited to just two panels and then, the next page, she's completely discarded as a character.

Still, as Medusa could tell you, you can't keep a good hairstyle down and it wasn't long before the Valkyrie was back and giving the Hulk lectures in women's rights, while throwing him off the Empire State Building. Sadly, such talk was as wasted on him as it was on Goliath.

The Valkyrie. The Norse with the horse.

In his song Woman, John Lennon implied that Yoko Ono was the other half of the sky. Well, I've had a look out the window and she isn't. He did however have a valid point that women make up half the population of the Earth. And that means that even the macho world of comic books'd be a strange place without them. As my recent campaigning for Red Sonja to be allowed to stay conscious throughout an entire adventure shows, I've always been a fearless champion of super-heroines' rights, and this raises the obvious question of who's my favourite Marvel super-heroine.

The truth is that, from the time-frame this blog deals with, there isn't actually that much to choose from, principally because most of Marvel's early heroines were co-created by Stan Lee and therefore spent more time worrying about their hair and love-life than they did trying to fight villains. Sue Storm was always trying to decide whether she wanted to marry Reed Richards or the Sub-Mariner, the Wasp only seemed to be fighting crime because her fiance did, the Scarlet Witch just seemed to be tagging along with her brother, and Medusa's super-power was her hair.

To redress this - and to try and double Marvel's profits by getting girls to read comics - the early 1970s saw an influx of new heroines like Red Sonja, the Cat and Shanna the She-Devil, designed to fall into the feminist mode by running around half naked and being a bit grumpy.

There was one "feminist" heroine, however who always stood out for me from that pack.

That woman was the Valkyrie.

If the others were meant to be Women's Lib, the Valkyrie pushed it off the dial, her first incarnation coming in The Avengers #83 as, carrying a grudge against men, the Enchantress took the guise in order to turn a bunch of fed-up super-heroines against the male Avengers before defeating those male Avengers.

Next she was the short-lived alter-ego of full-time protester Samantha Parrington in The Incredible Hulk #142, literally handing the Hulk a defeat before reverting to her original form.

And finally, in The Defenders #4, we got the finished article as the spirit of the Valkyrie took possession of sometime occultist Barbara Norris.

While her first two incarnations were short-lived, her third wasn't. It well and truly stuck and The Valkyrie became easily for my money the most interesting of Marvel's 1970s' attempts at feminist heroines.

For me, like a successful piece of origami, the reasons she worked were multi-fold. One, she was a lot more powerful than those others. In her first incarnation, she'd taken out the Avengers. In her second, she'd taken out the Hulk. The likes of Red Sonja, Shanna and the Cat might have been touted as a new breed of heroine but they were still feeble compared to their male equivalents. But here was a woman who could throw cars around, smash her way through brick walls and bend lamp posts. Given the existence over at DC of the likes of Supergirl and Wonder Woman, a super-strong woman might not seem that ground-breaking but, for whatever reason, Marvel had traditionally stayed clear of the concept.

Secondly she was slotted into the Defenders, a team ideally suited to a character who didn't fit in. Her status as not quite human and not quite goddess, leading her to need refuge amongst a group of misfits and outcasts. It also enabled her to be given a string of fish-out-of water story lines, whether they be set in a woman's prison, a university or what was left of her host body's marriage.

Thirdly was the perverse but correct decision to have her not talk like she should have. Realistically, being an Asgardian Valkyrie, she should've spoken like Thor, all, "verily, " this and, "varlet, " that but she didn't. For the most part she spoke like a normal if slightly stilted person.

The fourth reason was an inbuilt dichotomy of her combining ultra-masculine and ultra-feminine traits into one package. She wore an outfit that on one hand - with its bare legs and steel breast cups - was sexualised but on the other, forbidding. She had the physical power of a man but rode around on that little girl's fantasy a flying horse. She had a warrior's mindset but, if a super-team is a family, filled the role of being the group's maternal figure.

But in the end, let's face it, there's another reason the Valkyrie grabbed me.

It was the hair.

As a hairstyle, it made no sense. She was a warrior woman who thought it was a good idea to go into battle with zero-depth perception and a total inability to spot an attacker coming at her from the right. Somehow it didn't matter. Why? Because it made her look cool. That might not seem important but imagine Spider-Man with a Superman cape, or Batman dressed as Robin. How a super-hero looks counts. So maybe those Stan Lee heroines who spent all their time worrying about their hair had it right. Maybe hair really is the secret of success if you're a super-heroine.