BLITZKRIEG versus STORM
Chapter 5: Fourth Contest: Struggle in the Jungle! (Marvel)
Where: Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions #3 When: August 1982 Why: Mark Gruenwald, Steven Grant & Bill Mantlo How: John Romita Jr
The Story So Far...
Across the universe there exists immortal entities whose existence determines cosmic reality. The Grandmaster is one such being: an Elder of the Universe whose taste for games inspires a Contest of Champions!
Snatching the world's heroes from a temporarily frozen Earth; The Grandmaster drafts a team of twelve to represent him in a contest of life and death! His team will race to find segments of a golden artifact scattered to the four corners of the Earth!
The Grandmaster's ultimate prize is the restoration of his immortal brother: The Collector! Killed by the man-god Korvac; The Collector's demise is beyond even the vast cosmic reach of a fellow Elder. Thus, The Grandmaster's contest pits him against the ultimate opponent - Death herself!
Tale of the Tape...
Strength: Draw 2 (Average)
Intelligence: Storm 4 (Tactician)
Speed: Draw 2 (Average)
Stamina: Draw 3 (Athlete)
Agility: Storm 3 (Acrobat)
Fighting: Storm 4 (Trained)
Energy: Draw 5 (Lasers)
Total: Storm 23 (Champion)
It's the Contest of Champions, which means two teams of three represent The Grandmaster and Death in a race to recover a special artifact! Within each trial there are inevitable battles breaking out between competing heroes. That's our special area of interest, with today's clash promising sparks will fly!
Competing for The Grandmaster is Blitzkrieg: a West German hero making his debut in the 1982 series, partnered here with Captain America and Sasquatch.
In civilian life he was Franz Mittelstaedt: an electrical technician who was struck by lightning while inspecting a faulty generator. Blitzkrieg's origins and powers are similar to the villain Electro, but his ability to manipulate and direct charge lends itself more uniquely to generating and commanding the course of lightning strikes. That's something he'll find in abundance against today's opponent!
Storm literally represents Death in this contest, partnering with Collective Man and Shamrock. Usually she keeps the company of the mutant X-Men, but she's no stranger to flying solo for a cosmic contest like this one!
In Marvel versus DC #3, Storm brought lightning down upon Wonder Woman, securing a victory after the Amazon threw away the storm-bringing powers of Thor's hammer. No such clemency in today's battle, where lightning strikes will only grant Blitzkrieg more ammunition to electrocute her with!
Storm is typically a measured fighter with a keen mind for tactics. If she can avoid being bamboozled by an unfamiliar foe, her mutant ability to control the gamut of weather phenomena will give her a huge advantage!
We saw Storm's skills used tactically when she subtly raised the humidity to slow down Magneto in X-Men #113. She can also summon hurricane force winds, pummeling rain & hail, or a bitter cold to freeze her foe to the bone.
Storm does have one glaring weakness: claustrophobia. We saw Deathstroke use this debilitating fear of enclosed spaces against her in Uncanny X-Men and The New Teen Titans. The jungle setting in today's battle doesn't present any obvious risk for enclosure, so the forecast should be sunny for Storm!
The Tape: Storm Ranking: Storm (#51)
What Went Down...
Introductions are cut short as Blitzkrieg abruptly leaves his teammates, leaping on a stream of electrically charged particles to pursue their goal in the Contest.
It isn't long before "The Lord of the Lightning Strike" is spotted by one of their opponents who soars above the jungle terrain. With a simple gesture he sends lightning streaking towards her, forming an ensnaring electrical cage!
The German hero doesn't realise he's attack the mutant mistress of elements. With an indignant flexing of her muscles, Storm summons the necessary influence to shatter the cage, sending lightning blasting outward!
The skies darken as Storm catches up with her airborne opponent, but the raging thunder is a herald to more lightning that serves the will of Blitzkrieg. He turns its bolts against her, demanding that she yield to his power.
Blitzkrieg may have the advantage of shaping the lightning, but Storm controls all that her namesake entails!
Where: Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions #3 When: August 1982 Why: Mark Gruenwald, Steven Grant & Bill Mantlo How: John Romita Jr
The Story So Far...
Across the universe there exists immortal entities whose existence determines cosmic reality. The Grandmaster is one such being: an Elder of the Universe whose taste for games inspires a Contest of Champions!
Snatching the world's heroes from a temporarily frozen Earth; The Grandmaster drafts a team of twelve to represent him in a contest of life and death! His team will race to find segments of a golden artifact scattered to the four corners of the Earth!
The Grandmaster's ultimate prize is the restoration of his immortal brother: The Collector! Killed by the man-god Korvac; The Collector's demise is beyond even the vast cosmic reach of a fellow Elder. Thus, The Grandmaster's contest pits him against the ultimate opponent - Death herself!
Tale of the Tape...
Strength: Draw 2 (Average)Intelligence: Storm 4 (Tactician)
Speed: Draw 2 (Average)
Stamina: Draw 3 (Athlete)
Agility: Storm 3 (Acrobat)
Fighting: Storm 4 (Trained)
Energy: Draw 5 (Lasers)
Total: Storm 23 (Champion)
It's the Contest of Champions, which means two teams of three represent The Grandmaster and Death in a race to recover a special artifact! Within each trial there are inevitable battles breaking out between competing heroes. That's our special area of interest, with today's clash promising sparks will fly!
Competing for The Grandmaster is Blitzkrieg: a West German hero making his debut in the 1982 series, partnered here with Captain America and Sasquatch.
In civilian life he was Franz Mittelstaedt: an electrical technician who was struck by lightning while inspecting a faulty generator. Blitzkrieg's origins and powers are similar to the villain Electro, but his ability to manipulate and direct charge lends itself more uniquely to generating and commanding the course of lightning strikes. That's something he'll find in abundance against today's opponent!
Storm literally represents Death in this contest, partnering with Collective Man and Shamrock. Usually she keeps the company of the mutant X-Men, but she's no stranger to flying solo for a cosmic contest like this one!
In Marvel versus DC #3, Storm brought lightning down upon Wonder Woman, securing a victory after the Amazon threw away the storm-bringing powers of Thor's hammer. No such clemency in today's battle, where lightning strikes will only grant Blitzkrieg more ammunition to electrocute her with!
Storm is typically a measured fighter with a keen mind for tactics. If she can avoid being bamboozled by an unfamiliar foe, her mutant ability to control the gamut of weather phenomena will give her a huge advantage!
We saw Storm's skills used tactically when she subtly raised the humidity to slow down Magneto in X-Men #113. She can also summon hurricane force winds, pummeling rain & hail, or a bitter cold to freeze her foe to the bone.
Storm does have one glaring weakness: claustrophobia. We saw Deathstroke use this debilitating fear of enclosed spaces against her in Uncanny X-Men and The New Teen Titans. The jungle setting in today's battle doesn't present any obvious risk for enclosure, so the forecast should be sunny for Storm!
The Tape: Storm Ranking: Storm (#51)
What Went Down...
Introductions are cut short as Blitzkrieg abruptly leaves his teammates, leaping on a stream of electrically charged particles to pursue their goal in the Contest.
It isn't long before "The Lord of the Lightning Strike" is spotted by one of their opponents who soars above the jungle terrain. With a simple gesture he sends lightning streaking towards her, forming an ensnaring electrical cage!
The German hero doesn't realise he's attack the mutant mistress of elements. With an indignant flexing of her muscles, Storm summons the necessary influence to shatter the cage, sending lightning blasting outward!
The skies darken as Storm catches up with her airborne opponent, but the raging thunder is a herald to more lightning that serves the will of Blitzkrieg. He turns its bolts against her, demanding that she yield to his power.
Blitzkrieg may have the advantage of shaping the lightning, but Storm controls all that her namesake entails!
The howling gale answers Storm's command as she whips Blitzkrieg with intense rain and unforgiving winds! The lightning rider is immediately humbled, flung from the skies like a leaf in a hurricane!
The Hammer...
The victory goes to Storm, but the story doesn't end there. She expresses displeasure with being a pawn for her mysterious overseer, (Death), and is unseen as the race to uncover the Contest's golden artifact concludes.
In fact, it's Blitzkrieg who recovers from the battle, and uses his powers to create a wind vortex by super-charging molecules in the air. This strips the jungle of leafy growth and exposes the artifact for retrieval.
It's a bit of a strange twist, given how naturally Storm would've performed the same function. I can only suspect there was some effort being made to support the characters that were newly introduced in Contest of Champions. Blitzkrieg gets some credibility back, while Shamrock ultimately wins the heat.
The three-issue series does a decent job of incorporating a few foreign national heroes who already existed, to better blend the newly minted global heroes with the old. Popular additions like Storm, Sasquatch, and Black Panther lend heft to the concept, setting up headlining dream bouts like Wolverine vs Black Panther.
The international heroes created for the event weren't the most inspired bunch, but I appreciate the global flavor they added to the Marvel Universe.
With jingoistic origins circa World War II and The Cold War; Marvel Comics has tended to disproportionately populate the world with American super-heroes, and a modest smattering of European villains. The Contest went a ways to superficially addressing some of that issue, even if only by accident.
According to series editor Tom DeFalco: the Contest of Champions was originally conceived as a Marvel Treasury Edition to tie-in with the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. That plan was upended when the United States and their allies opted to boycott the Games over the Soviet Union's conflict in Afghanistan.
American audiences typically prefer to consume American stories and American characters. Marvel Treasury Edition #25 would later feature a Winter Olympic tie-in with Team USA, but the depleted Summer Games meant the original concept was effectively shelved, even as inker Pablo Marcos continued to work on pages from his home in South America.
Two confused years later and Pablo Marcos arrives in the Marvel offices in 1981 with around forty finished pages. Mixed communications had allowed Marcos to continue inking at a leisurely pace. DeFalco credits Mark Gruenwald with rapidly re-envisioning the finished work to pitch the mini-series we eventually got.
Adjustments for two years of publishing meant extensive reworking was needed to meet updated costumes and context, but it all worked out in the end. Sort of. There is one very famous mistake in this issue, which was ultimately completely edited by a promoted Gruenwald, while DeFalco dealt with personal tragedy. It completely undermines the end of the event, but that's a story for another day.
We're basically here to focus on Blitzkrieg, who's currently appearing in our own unofficial sequel to Contest of Champions. You can check out The Contest: Plastic Man vs Blitzkrieg to find out all about that, with a little added context now that you've seen the West German hero in action!
It's worth noting that West Germany was a country. This series was published in 1982: seven years before the Berlin Wall was torn down, and the subsequent reunification of Germany in 1990. That fact doesn't hold any special significance to the story, but it's an interesting piece of the time capsule it represents.
As you may have intuitively recognized; Blitzkrieg didn't go on to great success in the Marvel Universe. He was perhaps most notable for a short stint appearing in Mark Gruenwald's Captain America in the early nineties. There, he was briefly seen as part of the Schutz Heiligruppe: a German superhero team attempting to charge Red Skull and the Skeleton Crew with war crimes. Blitzkrieg made his final appearance in 1995, murdered by a teammate who was a serial hero killer.
I'm sure Blitzkrieg is a character few will miss, but I think it's a little bit of a shame he was so flippantly done away with. This is the kind of character that's good to keep in the mix for whenever they might be a story that calls for local German heroes. There are others, but none will have the history of debuting in The Contest of Champions.
If you wish to discover more contests like this you could follow links throughout this article, or dive into the Secret Index for a complete archive of featured fights ordered by publisher, series, and issue!
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Winner: Storm
#37 (+14) Storm
#904 (new) Blitzkrieg (Franz Mittelstaedt)
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