This cover caption has lived rent free in my heads for decades. You’re a kid… You’re flying a Shogun… And it’s really fun…. RIGHT? WRONG!
The local comic shop in my hometown started stocking American back issues sometime in the late eighties and every Wednesday I would go there and browse through to see what caught my eye. Shogun Warriors 17 was one of those. Not just one of the first American comics I ever bought, it may very well have been the very first mecha story I ever read.
Because that’s what Shogun Warriors was, a comic book based on a toy line that took the lead mecha from three different anime (Wakusei Robo Danguard Ace), Brave Raideen and Chōdenji Robo Combattler V) in an attempt to sell them to American children. Marvel was asked to create the comic as an advert for the toys and with only the toys as a reference, writer Doug Moench and artist Herb Trimpe invented a whole new story to go along with them, Trimpe also inventing the monsters the Shogun Warriors would fight. Nothing was carried over from the original stories these mecha appeared in; this isn’t even a Macross/Robotech situation.
What Moench and Trimpe invented was a story of a long ago war between the Followers of Light and the Followers of Dark, which the latter lost and after which they were sealed in a volcano. When its eruption threatened to revive the evil Follower of Dark Maur-Kon, a neat multinational three person squadron was formed to combat them, each given their own giant robot. Stuntman Richard Carson got Raydeen, test pilot Genji Odashu got Combatra and oceanographer Ilongo Savage got Dangard Ace, the coolest of the three. I’m not sure how much Moench and Trimpe knew about mecha anime or super sentai live action series, but the series sure reads like one, with the Warriors having to fight a series of monsters sent their way by Maur-Kon.
Shogun Warriors was created in 1978, at a time when Marvel did a lot of titles based on licensed properties and usually stuck them somewhere in the Marvel Universe. Moench and Trimpe had already done that with Godzilla before, while Micronauts, Rom, The Human Fly and Team America were launched at roughly the same time or slightly later. You could even argue that it all started with Conan the Barbarian: not explicitly set in the Marvel Universe at first, but once he got his first team-up with Spider-Man…
Shogun Warriors greatest contribution to the Marvel Universe was Doctor Demonicus, a super genetic engineer making giant monsters out of mutated animals. He would later pop up in Roy and Dann Thomas’s Avengers West Coast as a major villain. The final two issues of the series had the Fantastic Four as guest stars and the Warriors would return the favour in a later issue of Fantastic Four in which the robots were destroyed to tie off all the loose ends from the series.
Issue 17 though is a simple story of a young boy who discovers Combatra having been hidden in an abandoned building in San Francisco and accidentally triggers the mechanism that transports him into the cockpit. Not knowing how to operate it, the poor kid is along for the ride as Combatra goes on a rampage and Raydeen has to stop him… The cover was probably more exciting than the actual story, but it hardly mattered at the time.
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