Issue(s): Spider-Woman #39
Cover Date: Aug 81
Title: "Deathstroke"
Credits:
Chris Claremont - Writer
Stephen Leialoha - Penciler
Bob Wiacek - Inker

Review/plot:
This issue starts off with another psychic attack by Morgan Le Fey on Jessica while she is sleeping.

Then Jessica and Lindsay's landlord David Ishima is framed for a murder. It's part of a Yakuza plot, and they've hired an assassin called Deathstroke...

...and his ninja henchmen that he calls the Terminators, to kill him.

David worked at a construction site and knew about secret building designs that they were involved in. Sabrina Morrel ("Bree" for short), a policewoman with possible Yakuza ties, is introduced this issue.

According to the MCP, we last saw her in Marvel Team-Up #65-66 where she seemed to be some sort of super-spy operating in England. It's an odd shift to San Francisco police lieutenant. She isn't even named in the Team-Up story and she's a totally different sort of character so i'm not sure that it should count as an appearance, but i'm following MCP's lead.

Deathstroke and his Terminators are of course a reference to Deathstroke the Terminator, the Teen Titans character introduced by Marv Wolfman and George Perez about 6 months prior to this issue.

The MCP lists a behind-the-scenes appearance for General Nguyen Coy, the corrupt uncle of the future New Mutant Karma, for this issue. I assume at some point it turns out he has something to do with the Yakuza plot.

Getting redundant for me to say it, but Leialoha's art is pretty nice. In the scene below, Jessica is looking in on Lindsay to make sure that the Le Fey-introduced nightmare didn't disturb Lindsay in any way. I assume Lindsay must have a friend over for the night but we're not allowed to say that in a comic? But i just like Jess's face in that second panel.

Quality Rating: B

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: Pushed back in publication time a bit to account for Spider-Woman (and more specifically, Sabrina Morrel's) appearance in Avengers annual #10.

References:

• Spider-Woman made an enemy of Morgan Le Fey in Spider-Woman #6.
  
• Spider-Woman has recently been psychically attacked twice before by Morgan Le Fey, in Spider-Woman #35 and Spider-Woman #37.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

In addition to the Teen Titans references, Marvel's Deathstroke also looks a lot like DC's Manhunter.

I assume that the X-Men/Teen Titans comparisons were pretty prevalent by this time, leading Claremont to make the reference.
On a personal note, I had never heard of DC's Deathstroke until Claremont used him in the X-Men/Titans crossover later. It's his handling of the character that hooked me and made me seek out the TITANS series. When I encountered Deathstroke in his native title, written by Marv Wolfman, he was just as entertaining.

I find it funny that Claremont was willing to homage Deathstroke the Terminator here...and then, 10 years later, Liefeld tried to copy/paste Deatstroke into his own character complete with costume. Luckily saner (well insaner) minds prevailed but it does make you wonder if Deadpool ever met this guy.

Of all the civilian boyfriends of superheroines, David Ishima has to be the most boring. I have no idea why Jess would be interested in such a dud.

the Yakuza try to recruit him, despite him having no martial arts training, cause you know, he's Japanese.

More Terminators? Let's see now, we've got the Terminator appearing in ROM Spaceknight this year (1981), plus these Terminators in a Spider-Woman story, and the above-mentioned Deathstroke the Terminator at DC, and they're all coming out right around 1981, just a few years before James Cameron's Terminator movie in 1984. And let's see now, Cameron says he got the idea for the Terminator screenplay during the release of Piranha II: The Spawning, which was in 1981. Plausibly a mere coincidence, but we know from his output that the guy just had to have been a comic book reader at one point or another. Maybe a subconscious swipe? Who knows?

I always thought the Terminator films might have owed as much or more to 1981's Days Of Future Past than the Harlan Ellison stories that Ellison sued Cameron for. (Not that the ideas weren't out there in general - Byrne himself said the plot of DoFP came from Day Of The Daleks, though really there are a lot of differences apart from both involving time travel & an attempted assassination). Interesting to learn that Cameron's inspiration occurred in 1981.

Claremont himself will seemingly be influenced by the Terminator's unstoppable nature with Nimrod & other self-repairing Sentinels he later creates, though Alan Moore's 1982 creation The Fury, an unstoppable organic/mechanoid cross, was probably another influence for such creations.

Cameron was certainly a comic book reader at some point: Claremont & Stan Lee pitched an X-Men film to Cameron in 1989, with Claremont keen for Bob Hoskins to play Wolverine. However, Claremont says when Lee mentioned Spider-Man, Cameron's eyes lit up & Cameron much preferred doing a Spider-Man movie if that was available.

I can see Bob Hoskins as a younger man playing Wolverine but he wouldn't have aged very well. Too bad Ellison didn't put the same energy into writing characters that he put into being a character. It's pretty well impossible to do anything in science fiction that hasn't already been done in one fashion or another.

Nimrod was definitely based on the Fury, not the Terminator- Claremont's original plans were for Nimrod and the Fury to merge, until he was told that the Fury couldn't appear for legal reasons, hence the similarity between Nimrod and the Fury. Besides Terminator first came out in October 1984- Nimrod's first appearance was in X-Men 191, which came out in November of 1984 and he showed the ability to self-repair in X-Men 194, which came out in February of 1985. The issues were probably plotted before Terminator premiered.

Michael - do you have a link to that article about the Nimrod & Fury merge?

See here for info on Nimrod/Fury: https://www.cbr.com/comic-book-legends-revealed-300-part-3/3/

Thanks. That sounded like it would have been a really cool storyline. Too bad it never happened.