Issue(s): Champions #14, Champions #15
Cover Date: Jul-Sep 77
Title: "The creature called... Swarm!" / "Death drone!"
Credits:
Bill Mantlo - Writer
John Byrne - Penciler
Mike Esposito - Inker

Review/plot:
The 70s were apparently full of killer bee panic, with at least three killer bee movies: Killer Bees! (1974), The Savage Bees (1976), and The Swarm (1978). At least this issue came out before The Swarm, since it introduces a character called the Swarm.

None of those crappy movies feature a Nazi scientist whose skeleton is animated by mutant bees, though.

Only comic books can bring you such awesomeness.

The Champions defeat Swarm by killing his giant Queen bee.

When they aren't fighting bees of both the regular and giant variety...

...the Champions are also dealing with the fact that their own building keeps attacking them.

An effort is made to ensure that we know that the problem isn't due to Bill Foster's engineering; it's something to do with the materials. That's good, because i wouldn't want one of Marvel's few black scientists (like all Marvel scientists, he's building robotic parts even though he's a biophysicist) to look incompetent. It's bad enough he could barely defeat Stilt-Man; at least let him be a good super-scientist.

Nice art by John Byrne. Bill Mantlo isn't horrible - and we've seen plenty of horrible in the 70s - but he isn't great, either.

Ivan leaves the group to search for his son (the new Crimson Dynamo) in Russia at the beginning of this arc. The pier on which Ivan departs is the same as the one where Swarm begins his attack.

Iceman gets a new costume this issue. By "new costume", i really mean "a costume", since normally he runs around in his underwear.

This costume doesn't get much use but it's similar to the style he'll use in X-Factor a number of years later.

Quality Rating: C

Historical Significance Rating: 3 - first Swarm

Chronological Placement Considerations: Moved back a bit in order to make room for the Champions' appearance in Iron Man annual #4.

References:

• Ivan's son was revealed to be the new Crimson Dynamo in Champions #10.
  
• The "Champscraft", also designed by Bill Foster, went haywire in Champions #11.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

FOOM#16 announced Swarm as "the Drone".

Iceman's "new costume" always reminded me of Dynamo's, from the 1960s THUNDER Agents.

Killer-bee panic was a thing in the 1970s, yes. When Rupert Murdoch expanded his media operations to the United States and started sensationalizing formerly respectable newspapers, one of his notorious early headlines was "KILLER BEES HEADING NORTH!" The bee in question was still far away in South America. Maybe just negligibly closer than it had been before.

The Swarm is one of the single worst movies to ever be nominated for an Oscar (for Costume Design, of all things).

On the other hand, Swarm, the villain, was used in a pretty neat episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (which works, I suppose, since Iceman was one of them). In that case, as I recall (it's been over 30 years), Swarm was a mutated swarm due to radioactivity from a meteor or something - not a former human. Had a really cool distorted voice.

The Swarm is a challenge for writers and artists. Good ones will make him great and bad ones will make him terrible.

Two things about that costume: first he didn't used to just run around in his underwear -- he ran around in his underwear with pirate boots. Second, the thing I like about this costume is the way Byrne draws it so that it's clear that he doesn't just have his shorts outside his tights, like Superman does, instead he just has pants that have a white top.

If one is going to panic about something Nazi killer bees seem like a sensible thing to panic about