Friday, April 10, 2020

Nature Abhors A Villain


Can YOU


Name This Marvel Villain??



Our featured villain first appeared on the scene over forty years ago, but chances are you remember the distinctive appearance of Fritz von Meyer, better known as Swarm--a former Nazi who fled to South America and indulged in research involving killer bees. But even with such a seemingly benign pursuit, it turns out our scientist still had a hankering for world conquest--yet how would a beehive help him in that regard? We'll let the "man" himself explain, as he recounts his tale to Darkstar of the Champions.




As we can see, von Meyer's aspirations have been overheard by an Interpol agent, who would later meet a gruesome fate--though in certain respects, we could say the same for von Meyer when his experiment gets away from him (or, rather, gets horrifyingly close).




It's only when Hercules later deals with the further mutated queen bee by hurling it to its death that Swarm learns how fleeting his dreams of conquest were--much like the cohesion of his physical form, which comes to an end almost at the same time.





Swarm would reappear over the years to menace Spider-Man, the Secret Defenders, the X-Men, the Avengers, Squirrel Girl, et al. Of course if he shows up again he might want to look into a new name for himself--these days he'd be hard-pressed to gather enough bees to become mobile, much less menace anyone.

7 comments:

Big Murr said...

WELL, the brandest newest reboot of Ant-Man (Scott Lang) sees Swarm in action. For a split-second I rolled my eyes, then reconsidered...man who controls bees versus a man who controls ants? Perfect fight card!

Then, entering in a surprise tag-team are three new villains who are also humanoids composed of swarm insects...we'll have to see how that goes...

Tiboldt said...

How does he speak?

I can understand why he would want to maintain a human form with the cape, gloves and glasses rather than a big swarm of bees with a skeleton in the middle but it doesn't explain how he produces recognisable human speech from his mouth.

Big Murr said...

Speak?

With perfect control of buzz-buzzing bees, I imagined it was like conducing a symphony orchestra, each insect supplying a needed pitch or tone. Ending up with a sort of vibrating "Stephen Hawking" voice.

From the mouth is just due to having to point the word balloon at something. In later appearances, I'm sure they used a fancy word balloon/font to indicate strange sounding speech.

Comicsfan said...

That's as good an explanation as any, in this case. :)

Anonymous said...

I recently saw for the first time an old episode of Outer Limits (do not adjust your sets) that had a bee woman.
A very, very hot bee woman. She was the queen of the hive and she could assume human form. And boy howdy, what a form.
I wonder if she was the inspiration for D.C. Comics Queen Bee.
I liked Swarm. I thought he was a very original villain, and I was sad to see the Champions peter out. It had a goofy charm. One issue they were fighting Stilt-man, and the next they were teaming up with the Stranger.
Man, them expatriate Nazis in South America could cause a lotta trouble. Wasn't that where the Red Skull hid his Sleeper robots? I've seen that same plot device in D.C. and Hellboy. The jungles must be fulla Nazi doomsday weapons and maybe a few Hitler clones.
This villain had an original twist, though. A killer bee guy!

M.P.

Comicsfan said...

On a (somewhat) related note, the fact that The Outer Limits hasn't joined The Twilight Zone on Netflix is an oversight that stands out like a sore thumb.

lordjim6 said...

I agree with that. Add Seinfeld to the list. Also, can we give an honorable mention to The Simpsons pre Disney purchase of Fox?